Open source vs commercial e-learning systems

Citation

Stephenson, D. (2006), "Open source vs commercial e-learning systems", Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 23 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/cwis.2006.16523bab.001

Open source vs commercial e-learning systems

How popular are open source virtual learning environments (VLEs) with institutions of higher and further education? It is difficult to say with certainty, though recent announcements from the likes of the UK’s Open University, partnerships with a number of Ivy League universities and at least one popular open source community claiming 8,256 users in 144 countries – strongly suggest that their market footprint is growing.

The timing is hardly co-incidental. After years of listening to software vendors talk-up the potential benefits of e-learning in the classroom, educational establishments are now experiencing a direct correlation between e-learning deployments and an improvement in both grades and student retention. E-learning tools are now making education better, and when you factor in other benefits such as reduced administrative workload, increased collaboration between students and a new pedagogical flexibility for an increasingly diverse student population, the sums are proving as attractive as promised.

Against this backdrop however, an increasingly polarized debate has intensified between those who support open source VLEs and those who support commercially-developed solutions. The “battle” consists of opposing and competitive viewpoints, with a veritable blizzard of white papers and presentations now in circulation, each defending and recommending one – and only one – alternative. Despite the apparent rancour, a sort of détente between open source and proprietary systems is possible. In truth they are not mutually exclusive.

Commercial e-learning vendors have invested significantly in building and sustaining highly scalable, extensible and comprehensive products. Their traditional financing, organisational and development resources have placed them in the best position to incorporate quality and performance testing, ongoing software maintenance, a formalized feature enhancement process, customer support, and the aftermarket services required to support an enterprise-scale e-learning solution.

Open source communities, on the other hand, have typically lacked the resources to provide crucial baseline functionality, so administrators have been forced to either live with less or devote additional IT resources to developing a more robust platform. Furthermore, institutions have had to take on the onerous and costly responsibility for stability, security, and reliability. These factors can impact not only an institution’s IT budget, but also the quality of service provided to faculty and students and the institution’s ability to deliver on its academic mission.

Open source developers, have, however, earned a well-deserved reputation for nimbleness and shared-innovation, which lends itself well to the collaborative culture of higher education. This is partly due to the fact that open source developers tend to originate from the academic environment. Being closely attuned to the day-to-day needs of the institutions that employ them, they have been successful at conceptualizing and creating e-learning application modules that can then be modified and reincorporated into other open source systems. Access to an application’s source code creates near limitless opportunities for system modification provided enough resources are allocated. Examples of open source extensions include e-learning software components, content libraries, teaching and learning tools and other bespoke applications.

The opportunity exists to build on these early successes by providing a broader range of functional alternatives that integrate with – and complement – commercial e-learning platforms. A few of the industry’s leading lights have already seen this potential and have begun to embrace a “third way” that melds respect for the values that drive open source adoption with the proven risk mitigation of commercially engineered software: Open Systems. In Open Systems, portions of the vendor code are exposed to academic open source communities via standards-based APIs so that they can modify components and add their own (or third party) extensions to the application’s core teaching and learning capabilities.

Maintaining the mission-critical components of the overall e-learning platform requires development and support resources that commercial vendors are best positioned to deliver. Rather than struggling to build and sustain the full e-learning infrastructure and platform, the open systems approach allows open source communities to focus their efforts on developing the specialised teaching and learning extensions that fully leverage their pedagogical experience and innovative ideas. This added-value development approach allows Open Source developers to build on the strengths of commercial systems, combining the benefits of both for the best overall solution.

Open systems are an attractive alternative to the current bickering that characterises the e-learning marketplace. Commercial and open source vendors can work in tandem to offer the flexibility for customization and extension that institutions find attractive, typically at a lower cost of ownership and without the inherent risks of pure open source projects. Open systems also provide the reliability, completeness, and security of a thoroughly tested and professionally supported commercial solution.

This best-of-both-worlds approach speaks to a spirit of collaboration and respects the reality – well established in other market segments of the broader software industry – that the open source community is an invaluable source of innovation that can synergistically coexist with, and compliment, commercial vendor products and solutions.

David StephensonDirector, WebCT UK