This recent Inside Higher Ed, “Outsourcing, Open Source and Budget Cuts,” is about recent trends in college computing, and it seems to square with some of the issues going on here at EMU right now. You can read it on your own, but the trend has been a shift to outsource email (Google is the leader in this), campus notification programs, budget cuts, and open source options for online teaching.
Now, I know we’ve outsourced our email systems (so far, so good), and I also know we have a cell phone alert system. I’m not sure if EMU’s ICT has suffered the same kind of budget cuts that have been a national trend (about half of public institution IT departments have had budget cuts), and I’m not sure if the budget cuts for ICT at EMU have been in proportion to other units on campus. Maybe yes, maybe no.
But I’m most interested in finding out where EMU is at in terms of considering course management systems, particularly open source solutions.
Here’s what the article says:
Meanwhile, although enterprise, license-based learning management platforms continue to dominate the higher education landscape (56.8 percent use Blackboard, down from 66.3 percent last year), the potential for increasing open source adoption remains. For the first time, the survey asked respondents about their likelihood to adopt open-source solutions such as Moodle or Sakai. Almost a quarter, 24.4 percent, reported a high likelihood that their institutions would migrate within five years, by 2013. The numbers were significantly lower for other open-source applications, such as content management systems and human resource management software.
As it stands, Moodle is used at more than twice the number of colleges than Sakai, with 10 percent adopting the former institution-wide compared with under 4 percent for the latter. The discrepancy owes mainly to private four-year colleges, which overwhelmingly choose Moodle, while public universities favor Sakai in almost a reverse pattern. The two solutions are divided about equally in other sectors.
This is most certainly a current topic on campus since there is a committee that is (supposedly) going to decide on a “common platform” for online teaching. I’m not completely sure how much of a charge this committee really has, and I’m not sure what they are going to be able to do to compel folks who teach online to potentially do things differently. But I do know this committee exists.
Right now, most folks are using eCollege (e.g., emuonline), which has its advantages and disadvantages, but it generally “works.” If the university decides to just stay with this, that’d be fine with me. If the institution decides to switch to an open source platform, that would also be fine with me. I’ve actually thought about installing Moodle myself to see how it works. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that we don’t go down the Blackboard path….
