Often in an effort to show added value, proponents for an open source application will include the benefits of open source development, for example, the ability to customize the application for campus-specific needs. This was just the case when I attended the recent NERCOMP/EDUCAUSE Conference and sat in on a presentation discussing a campus' recent migration from Blackboard to Moodle. The presentation started off with, what I feel where several salient issues; why they felt it was time to re-evaluate their on-line teaching and learning tools, how they identified and evaluated the various offerings (feature set, licensing, etc.) and, migration and training issues. These topics where all specifically related to their department's business practices and campus/faculty/student needs in on-line education. Unfortunately this was only half of the hour-long presentation. The second half was devoted to technical issues and presented by a PHP developer who was introduced as, “someone you really needed to have if you are going to run an open source LMS.” The topics discussed were; setting up a server (both hardware and software), downloading and installing Moodle and MySQL, development tools, working with the Moodle community in development and finding support, and even examples of both their customizations and supporting PHP code.
Why would these issues be of concern for faculty, instructional technologists and others evaluating the functionality and usability of learning management systems? If this had been a presentation on migrating to Angel from Blackboard, would the second half of the presentation be seen as important, even relevant, with issues like; how to set up IIS, SQL Server, using Visual Studio, Nuggets development and .NET? I doubt it. I suspect most in the crowd would have assumed that their campus' IT department would just set it up and support it.
Like customization, collaboration is also frequently cited as a reason to adopt OSS. The idea is that because OSS is developed in an open community where achievements are shared, end-users can leverage this development to increase functionality. And this is true. Scrolling through many open source project forums yields plenty of how to's, fixes and patches, tips and tricks, etc. Last year, a debate arose about who the Sakai community was and who it best served. I added to the debate within the Sakai discussions:
I have found Sakai, the community, to be a welcome discussion (and often education) on manyof the issues I am dealing with in my organization such as: legitimacy of Open Source, portals/frameworks, scope of services (redundancy of functionality across systems), technology issues,etc. The knowledge base and experiences of the people within the Sakai community, whether theyare actually contributing code or not, or whether they are even running Sakai on their campus,is a valuable resource for me as I work within my own organization.
As a technologist, I would not define myself as an educator. I have never held a faculty positionand the only teaching I have done has been technical workshops. So while I find both theSakai discussions, as well as the Sakai community, extremely valuable, I wonder if what we arediscussing, and is of interest to me, would also be useful to others with different interests andbackgrounds?
I was essentially asking, how valuable is the community and collaboration for end-users? In order to find out I researched the discussion forums and measured the number of posts per topic, from the very technical such as “development” where code was discussed to areas like “pedagogy” where instructors discussed the use of Sakai in the classroom.
The results showed that technical discussions dominated, for example the “development” discussion accounted for just over 71% of the total Sakai discussions, while pedagogy accounted for 1.58%. I don't know if this is typical, but I suspect other open source forums would yield similar findings, think of SourceForge. Now I can think of several examples where there are great, end-user driven discussions taking place that provide users with best practices. Keeping to the LMS theme, the LAMS global community is a website for teachers where they can share LAMS sequences. But I would assume many find Blackboard's users groups where, “thousands are standing by,” helpful as well.
The value of collaboration and community in open source is a technology issue that provides for higher quality code, rapid development, etc. And, while there is no doubt in the value of community and collaboration for end-users of an application, it is not solely delivered through open source as many commercial providers have excellent user groups.
The above examples of open source development, code exposure and collaboration, are just two examples of how software practices and software applications can be confused. Including open source and community development practices as a benefit in a department's analysis matrix does not show any real value for a particular software application. These practices are critical factors for highlighting the value of open source as a development process, but not for the specific software that may be under consideration as a packaged feature set.
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