Below, I will suggest why I think higher education institutions ought to consider open-source software, but fi rst let me quickly gloss over the evaluation, selection and implementation. Other than licensing regime - it had to be an open-source license, there were three other demands imposed by our particular circumstances.
- Since WebCT was being aggressively implemented by the Distance Education Centre 1 and the other two campuses, the replacement would need to be implemented as soon as possible to reduce the number of persons who would need to be re-trained for the entire University to adopt the FLOSS replacement.
- Because the influential, tech-savvy first adopters across the University would be among the WebCT user base by the end of the first academic year, the replacement system would need to have a low learning curve relative to WebCT for these persons and at the same time provide additional value other than cost-savings (since their campuses could afford WebCT).
- Although 2003 marked the official launch of the first University-wide LMS implementation, several other LMSs were already in use or proposed for use in 2003 by individual departments, and so any replacement system would need to provide an equivalent or more powerful set of features.
By early October 2003 the evaluation had begun with literature reviews, visits to other institutions, and discussions with faculty members and academic leaders to gather requirements. A few courses were deployed on WebCT to help us in the information gathering process.
The evaluation processes were very inclusive and the University-wide dialogue was facilitated in part by a discussion group on the development instance of Moodle 2. During the second semester, the consensus on the Mona campus was that we would deploy Moodle as the campus's LMS, and we voiced our hope that the other campuses would follow as soon as summer of that year.
At Mona we led the indigenizing process by creating a UWI theme for the user interface, integrating it with our central authentication system, our homegrown Student Registration System, the email system, and later the Badging system (for photo IDs of staff and students). We also took the strategic decision to re-brand it, OurVLE 3, for Our Virtual Learning Environment.
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