About one week before I joined the IT department of the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI) as the first staff member of Instruction Support Systems (ISS, the educational technology unit), I sat in a room with about twenty other persons, primarily faculty members, and was trained to use WebCT, as part of the forty or so persons on our campus to be so trained.
The next week I was put in charge of ensuring that faculty members across the campus adopted the system. That was May 2003. Four months later and two IT staff members richer, having worked long hard hours with faculty members on the Mona campus, we had about twenty four courses with over a thousand unique students ready to go for the start of the first semester.
Both the faculty members and I thought this was an immense success - but at that point I was informed that the University simply could not afford that many licenses. They wanted me to ask the faculty members to use another proprietary system with lesser functionality.
In apologizing to my clients, I assured them it would never happen again. I also told them plainly why it had happened, and why it would not recur. The reason it wouldn't recur, of course, is because we would implement an open source replacement by the next semester. And that was how I came to receive permission from the IT Management team and the blessings of our faculty members to deploy the University's first open-source enterprise system.
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