Serendipity35

NYNJA STAR is the New York/New Jersey Association Supporting Teaching and Research (that's way too many letters!) - a consortium of colleges that use Blackboard products (they were formerly the NY/NJ Blackboard Users Group). I'm at their Second Annual Conference on June 19 at Princeton University. The conference theme is "interoperability."

Although NJIT is a WebCT campus, since the two companies have recently merged, at some point in the next few years, if we stay with that CMS,we will be using a Blackboard product. Pprobably user groups will also merge - currently we are active in the Northeast WebCT User Group (NEWUG).

Recently, 200 officials who are responsible for software selection at a range of higher education institutions were surveyed about OSS. Two-thirds of these CIOs said they have considered or are actively considering using open source products, while about 25% of institutions are implementing higher education-specific open source software.

Many colleges are considering using open source software as a way of taking control of both the design and cost of supporting instruction and administration. It takes only cursory exploration into this area to discover that issues of support are critical and perhaps overwhelming for some institutions.

While interoperability is used to describe the capability of different programs to exchange data via a common set of procedures, that definition focuses on the technical side and interoperability can often be an organizational issue. Some have described the higher ed approach to OSS as “affirmative ambivalence” because of the wait-and-see approach that is being taken.

At NJIT, we have created Moodle and Sakai sandbox environments to experiment with, but our earlier entry into open source software was using OSS blogs (like this one) and wikis (see http://devel2.njit.edu/mediawiki/ as an example). Blog and wiki installations require many of the same considerations as a CMS, but on a much smaller scale.

So my conference session looks at starting out with an open source project using a wiki or blog: what they look like; obtaining the software & a bit on installation; uses for educators; and user training & support issues.

Some things that might be preventing more schools from trying open source software solutions: lack of commercial vendor support for schools that require it (as with Red Hat's enterprise version of the "free" OSS Linux); need for software developers to support the product on campus; and fear that the university will consider OSS as just a way to save money (and therefore not support the implementation with staff & funding) Many schools realize that at least a portion of the savings from software licensing costs will need to be shifted to IT support. The Sakai pilot at Rutgers is an example of that.