open source admin in academia? (editorial)
I'm becoming more aware of the fact that one reason universities need to charge those tuitions is to pay licensing fees to private vendors who provide them with such basic services as the ability to store and schedule classes, record student enrollment and grades, record instructors etc. The catalog needs to be published on-line. There might be a lot of extended education options, e.g. non-credit courses open to anyone willing to sign up. Some of these proprietary programs are pretty old, lack features departments need, and so various intermediating applications grow up around the edges to fill in the gaps. Maybe the big dino system doesn't record student evaluations for example, or keep track of which courses are in the pipeline, but still haven't found a place in the sun. One would think that universities in particular, which pride themselves on having advanced knowledge of state of the art skills, would band together in various consortia to pool resources and "eat their own dog food" as it were. A school that teaches medicine actually practices medicine (the "teaching hospital"). Shouldn't schools that teach computer science and business administration actually walk the talk in some way? Maybe many of them do, I don't actually know. To outsource something so core to one's business, to pay licensing fees while not having the power to make design modifications, just seems more than a tad on the ironic side. It's like a bank outsourcing everything it does around money. I realize not every college or university wants to reinvent the wheel around something so basic, but I do wonder to what extent there's some open source sharing going on, around these core utilities. Are universities so competitive they won't share? So does that mean they all pay the same licensing fees to use the same private vendor offerings? I remember Zope / Plone and SchoolTool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SchoolTool Is there something even more comprehensive that's out there, suitable for college and university use? Does it come in modularized components? Is it an over-the-web database? Or do few if any universities really eat their own dog food? Like I say, I'm new to this business, just trying to get oriented. Kirby
It frequently happens that the Computer Science Dept. uses Free Software for almost everything, and everybody else uses proprietary software. CS can't talk to the others effectively, because they are "just geeks". I have more hope for elementary schools. There are exceptions, such as Moodle. On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 18:30, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm becoming more aware of the fact that one reason universities need to charge those tuitions is to pay licensing fees to private vendors who provide them with such basic services as the ability to store and schedule classes, record student enrollment and grades, record instructors etc. The catalog needs to be published on-line. There might be a lot of extended education options, e.g. non-credit courses open to anyone willing to sign up.
Some of these proprietary programs are pretty old, lack features departments need, and so various intermediating applications grow up around the edges to fill in the gaps.
Maybe the big dino system doesn't record student evaluations for example, or keep track of which courses are in the pipeline, but still haven't found a place in the sun.
One would think that universities in particular, which pride themselves on having advanced knowledge of state of the art skills, would band together in various consortia to pool resources and "eat their own dog food" as it were. A school that teaches medicine actually practices medicine (the "teaching hospital"). Shouldn't schools that teach computer science and business administration actually walk the talk in some way? Maybe many of them do, I don't actually know.
To outsource something so core to one's business, to pay licensing fees while not having the power to make design modifications, just seems more than a tad on the ironic side. It's like a bank outsourcing everything it does around money.
I realize not every college or university wants to reinvent the wheel around something so basic, but I do wonder to what extent there's some open source sharing going on, around these core utilities. Are universities so competitive they won't share? So does that mean they all pay the same licensing fees to use the same private vendor offerings?
I remember Zope / Plone and SchoolTool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SchoolTool
Is there something even more comprehensive that's out there, suitable for college and university use? Does it come in modularized components? Is it an over-the-web database?
Or do few if any universities really eat their own dog food?
Like I say, I'm new to this business, just trying to get oriented.
Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 5:29 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
It frequently happens that the Computer Science Dept. uses Free Software for almost everything, and everybody else uses proprietary software. CS can't talk to the others effectively, because they are "just geeks". I have more hope for elementary schools.
Yes, I understand. Actually I suppose my query has two components, one having to do with the self sufficiency of educational institutions when it comes to the core software needed to run their operations... and the other having to do with free and open source software, which is one way communities band together collaboratively, in order to co-develop said core software. Like maybe MIT has some big programs for scheduling courses, registering students, keeping info on financial aid / scholarships, and publishing the catalog, all of which was developed in-house over many iterations -- but none of these applications have been released under GNU or other open source license. In that case, MIT would be self sufficient by criterion (a), but is not in the business of helping other schools ramp up using customized versions of said FOSS software (b). Maybe it's too site specific? MIT's in-house solutions might use open source (e.g. Python) but the solutions themselves are the closely guarded secrets of MIT (likewise a private company or government agency, like Industrial Light and Magic, or NASA, might use Python but not see any reason to share code). This is all familiar ground by now -- we're all aware of these distinctions. I'm just thinking back to all those OSCON talks by R0ml Lefkowitz and others, connecting FOSS practices and ethics to the culture of the liberal arts. If FOSS is about empowering and enabling local control, then why would any self-respecting academy want to outsource its core functions? What kind of message does that send? One could imagine that big strong universities would be somewhat self-sufficient, semi-autonomous, when it came to managing their own admin internals. Do we have some well known examples? Having the system completely open for tweaking to those on the premises potentially means faster evolution, more expression of the human imagination, a tighter coupling between theory and practice, drawing board and realized features. Schools could develop a reputation for the ingenuity of their internal applications, which might also help students coordinate their own schedules, promote events, submit work etc. Teachers would have access to multiple resources as well, including tools no one has thought of yet... Beyond that, it means a culture that knows first hand about collaborating on large projects, complete with version control, division of responsibilities and all the rest of it. Shouldn't universities be centers of innovation, starting with the bread and butter applications that define their institutional relationships? I remember a panel discussion I attended at a previous OSCON, about open source in Africa. The institutions in that picture were quite keen to do as much of their own programming as possible, as the whole point was to develop the skills and understanding needed for self sufficiency. Licensing fees can be a huge drain, and are in principal avoidable in this day and age, given sufficient commitment to local control. I also remember CERN having some conference scheduling software the EuroPython tried to repurpose for some context outside CERN, and how frustrating that was. Not every inhouse tool is equally adaptable. Similar question on Slashdot, re FLOSS conference management software: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/02/1954247
There are exceptions, such as Moodle.
I suppose the argument could be made that universities charged with teaching just don't have the time and resources to compete with private industry, when it comes to developing software for production use, bug free enough to entrust with student records and finances. However, given how Linux, FreeBSD and GNU got off the ground, you'd think there'd be a ready-made culture of developers here, at least in some schools. Add the open source ethic and model for sharing, and one wonders why there's not already a lot of free and open solutions out there -- like frameworks. Here's something obscure that's at least in the ballpark: http://tinyurl.com/2dpr6eb """ This paper describes a WAP-based course registration system designed and implemented to facilitating the process of students' registration at Bahrain University. The framework will support many opportunities for applying WAP based technology to many services such as wireless commerce, cashless payment… and location-based services. ...so is Bahrain University somewhat self sufficient when it comes to admin software? Kirby
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 18:30, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm becoming more aware of the fact that one reason universities need to charge those tuitions is to pay licensing fees to private vendors who provide them with such basic services as the ability to store and schedule classes, record student enrollment and grades, record instructors etc. The catalog needs to be published on-line. There might be a lot of extended education options, e.g. non-credit courses open to anyone willing to sign up.
Some of these proprietary programs are pretty old, lack features departments need, and so various intermediating applications grow up around the edges to fill in the gaps.
Maybe the big dino system doesn't record student evaluations for example, or keep track of which courses are in the pipeline, but still haven't found a place in the sun.
One would think that universities in particular, which pride themselves on having advanced knowledge of state of the art skills, would band together in various consortia to pool resources and "eat their own dog food" as it were. A school that teaches medicine actually practices medicine (the "teaching hospital"). Shouldn't schools that teach computer science and business administration actually walk the talk in some way? Maybe many of them do, I don't actually know.
To outsource something so core to one's business, to pay licensing fees while not having the power to make design modifications, just seems more than a tad on the ironic side. It's like a bank outsourcing everything it does around money.
I realize not every college or university wants to reinvent the wheel around something so basic, but I do wonder to what extent there's some open source sharing going on, around these core utilities. Are universities so competitive they won't share? So does that mean they all pay the same licensing fees to use the same private vendor offerings?
I remember Zope / Plone and SchoolTool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SchoolTool
Is there something even more comprehensive that's out there, suitable for college and university use? Does it come in modularized components? Is it an over-the-web database?
Or do few if any universities really eat their own dog food?
Like I say, I'm new to this business, just trying to get oriented.
Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/
Hello, There are several open source, community developed projects widely-used in higher ed. For example, moodle is a widely-used course management system: http://moodle.com/ Sakai is another course management system for use in higher ed: http://sakaiproject.org/ The Jasig consortium provides several applications used in higher ed: http://www.jasig.org/ The following, while not specifically focused on higher ed, are also widely deployed in higher ed environments: http://roundcube.net/ http://squirrelmail.org/ http://www.list.org/ http://www.isc.org/software/bind Best, Jarrod
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 10:31 PM, Jarrod Millman <millman@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Hello,
There are several open source, community developed projects widely-used in higher ed. For example, moodle is a widely-used course management system: http://moodle.com/ Sakai is another course management system for use in higher ed: http://sakaiproject.org/ The Jasig consortium provides several applications used in higher ed: http://www.jasig.org/
The following, while not specifically focused on higher ed, are also widely deployed in higher ed environments: http://roundcube.net/ http://squirrelmail.org/ http://www.list.org/ http://www.isc.org/software/bind
Best, Jarrod
Thank you Jarrod, exactly the kind of doorway into this topic I was looking for. You've saved me some time. Here's a random example of a commercial vendor and all with a list of features I'm wondering if some universities supply themselves (in-house), and/or what's out there that's open source (perhaps with support services). http://www.verdexsoft.net/university-software.htm I'm seeing dribs and drabs. I notice Yale invented Centralized Authentication Service (CAS) and that Princeton is involved somehow. Berkeley DB is from Berkeley, used in OpenLDAP (originally from Umich). These kinds of things. Maybe there's a whole literature I've yet to unearth. I like to see universities taking the lead in some way... (they call it "non-commercial"), eating their own dog food. Same thing with hospitals. They seem to not want to develop much inhouse, even for research -- or maybe I've not been inside the right hospitals? You'd think the open source ethic and health care would be more hand in glove. Then you get a bevy of commercial companies offering expertise with these open source tools, e.g.: http://www.unicon.net/company/about#Domain_Expertise Note: Oracle now owns Berkeley DB and has put the Sqlite3 API in front of it (as an option). Costs big bucks looks like. Kirby PS: I came across this useful discussion on Dr. Chuck's blog (he posts here sometimes -- we met at Pycon2009 in Chicago). Reading: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=opensource
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 04:34, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I like to see universities taking the lead in some way... (they call it "non-commercial"), eating their own dog food.
Same thing with hospitals. They seem to not want to develop much inhouse, even for research -- or maybe I've not been inside the right hospitals? You'd think the open source ethic and health care would be more hand in glove.
MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), now sometimes just M, is the basis for the VA and DoD hospital systems. it was taken to Free Software via the Freedom of Information Act, and is now available as openVistA. This is a full medical system suite, with more than 200 modules for imaging, medical records, billing, pharmacy, and so on. M is unusual among programming languages for including its own database engine. Its more recent competitor is OpenMRS (Open Medical Records System) being developed for Partners in Health in Haiti and other such organizations. Harvard has a hand in its development.
Kirby
PS: I came across this useful discussion on Dr. Chuck's blog (he posts here sometimes -- we met at Pycon2009 in Chicago).
Reading: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=opensource _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/
Ah yes, MUMPS. I have some history around that one. It haunts me. Poor Haiti. Kirby On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 7:54 PM, Edward Cherlin <echerlin@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 04:34, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I like to see universities taking the lead in some way... (they call it "non-commercial"), eating their own dog food.
Same thing with hospitals. They seem to not want to develop much inhouse, even for research -- or maybe I've not been inside the right hospitals? You'd think the open source ethic and health care would be more hand in glove.
MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), now sometimes just M, is the basis for the VA and DoD hospital systems. it was taken to Free Software via the Freedom of Information Act, and is now available as openVistA. This is a full medical system suite, with more than 200 modules for imaging, medical records, billing, pharmacy, and so on. M is unusual among programming languages for including its own database engine. Its more recent competitor is OpenMRS (Open Medical Records System) being developed for Partners in Health in Haiti and other such organizations. Harvard has a hand in its development.
Kirby
PS: I came across this useful discussion on Dr. Chuck's blog (he posts here sometimes -- we met at Pycon2009 in Chicago).
Reading: http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=opensource _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Edward Mokurai (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://www.earthtreasury.org/
http://openobject.com/ (openERP) is also a spreading framework, which could be applied in edu, for now there is a goog example for public sector with http://medical.forge.osor.eu/ On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 8:31 AM, Jarrod Millman <millman@berkeley.edu> wrote:
Hello,
There are several open source, community developed projects widely-used in higher ed. For example, moodle is a widely-used course management system: http://moodle.com/ Sakai is another course management system for use in higher ed: http://sakaiproject.org/ The Jasig consortium provides several applications used in higher ed: http://www.jasig.org/
The following, while not specifically focused on higher ed, are also widely deployed in higher ed environments: http://roundcube.net/ http://squirrelmail.org/ http://www.list.org/ http://www.isc.org/software/bind
Best, Jarrod _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Jurgis Pralgauskis tel: 8-616 77613; Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;) http://kompiuterija.pasimokom.lt
On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 3:30 PM, kirby urner <kirby.urner@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm becoming more aware of the fact that one reason universities need to charge those tuitions is to pay licensing fees to private vendors who provide them with such basic services as the ability to store and schedule classes, record student enrollment and grades, record instructors etc. The catalog needs to be published on-line. There might be a lot of extended education options, e.g. non-credit courses open to anyone willing to sign up.
Of course it takes time/energy to develop such software no matter who is doing it. If a university can afford a system architect and to pay developers, fine. I know Reed College had an ad in the paper for Open Source Developer (PHP centric). But that doesn't mean the fruits of this labor are shared with a wider community (might not be relevant). "Open source" may just mean that the tools themselves are open (e.g. a LAMP stack), not that anything developed is going to escape the silo.
Some of these proprietary programs are pretty old, lack features departments need, and so various intermediating applications grow up around the edges to fill in the gaps.
I interviewed this system architect from a large community college and he talked about how their in-house people used to run everything to do with admin (courses, enrollment, scholarships, instructor compensation...) using FORTRAN on a mainframe. Over time, components were modernized, moved to other technologies. Just before he left, the school signed on with a major vendor. He said this was a result of some political wheeling and dealing and that the in-house people were still using their own systems, but stuffing data into the vendor product to keep the politicians happy in some way. The vendor product was quite lame in the opinion of most staffers.
Maybe the big dino system doesn't record student evaluations for example, or keep track of which courses are in the pipeline, but still haven't found a place in the sun.
This is a real life situation I'm facing. To make up for what's missing in the vendor product, they have a one-of-a-kind custom application written in FoxPro. FoxPro has been a rather popular language in the Microsoft world, though Microsoft has tended to be ambivalent about it (competes with Access, is in so many ways better than Access). The decision was to not commit to any VFP 10 (no more releases), while putting most developer tools into Codeplex (the "shared source" repository). Some FoxPro developers decided to code a development environment that was rather similar, in Python. That's Ed Leaf and Dabo. I've been to a couple of his talks, shared Vietnamese food in Washington DC that time. In any case, the concepts are all familiar if you do RDBMS. Xbase, originally developed in connection with some JPL satellite project (interesting lore) had it's own non-SQL way of talking to tables though -- with SQL grafted on later.
One would think that universities in particular, which pride themselves on having advanced knowledge of state of the art skills, would band together in various consortia to pool resources and "eat their own dog food" as it were. A school that teaches medicine actually practices medicine (the "teaching hospital"). Shouldn't schools that teach computer science and business administration actually walk the talk in some way? Maybe many of them do, I don't actually know.
That seems a boldly correct statement on the face of it maybe, but I've been listening to the counter-arguments. One smart exec I know put it this way: "a university's main mission is to prepare a large number of students for entry level positions in various professional walks of life, NOT to write sophisticated software that tries to compete with Microsoft Word -- it takes a veritable army to write industrial grade code, and who's got that kind of time or resources within academia?"
To outsource something so core to one's business, to pay licensing fees while not having the power to make design modifications, just seems more than a tad on the ironic side. It's like a bank outsourcing everything it does around money.
As another co-worker put it, universities won't lean on something so nebulous as an "open source community" if that means there's no one on the hook to hold accountable if something goes wrong. This is the chief advantage of having a vendor: if the system breaks, there's someone specific to call. In the eyes of your supervisors, you've done all you need to do: report the problem and keep the pressure on. People on some other payroll are responsible. One alternative is to get into a finger pointing war as to which component is to blame and who the maintainer might be. This is the stereotyped picture of the open source world, fed by some vendors. If something breaks, no one knows who to contact. You're dead in the water without a service contract.
From one of Microsoft's own memos:
As far as forming a partnership with a third-party is concerned, we've heard from a number of large FoxPro customers that this would make it impossible for them to continue to use FoxPro since it would no longer be from an approved vendor. We felt that putting the environment into open source on CodePlex, which balances the needs of both the community and the large customers, was the best path forward." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro That's another stereotype of open source I'm afraid: a hodge podge of older / used technologies, maybe on their way out, every dime extracted, and so now given away to the community for the die-hards to "maintain" for free (good luck to 'em). Is that what's happening with MUMPs I wonder?
I realize not every college or university wants to reinvent the wheel around something so basic, but I do wonder to what extent there's some open source sharing going on, around these core utilities. Are universities so competitive they won't share? So does that mean they all pay the same licensing fees to use the same private vendor offerings?
Putting on my idealistic hat again, I'm imagining universities as throbbing centers of innovation. Rather than simply point students to Facebook, Youtube, Blogger and Flickr as ways to build one's ePortfolio (as I was hearing about at the recent AAPT meeting (physics teachers)), the university itself could have it's own social networking tools. Student organizing and collaboration would be all that much easier because some of the brightest, freshest minds were doing custom project development in-house. A senior thesis may be increasingly something multi-media that needs to run (as in execute). The possibilities, for an art scholar, would depend in part on what the art school might provide, in the way of electronic infrastructure. Music schools need good instruments. As a metaphor, that works in computing. Hot new ideas would germinate in the university (like Linux did) and then feed the larger community. The liberal arts perspective means lowering barriers to entry across the board. MIT's OpenCourseware is indicative of this commitment.
I remember Zope / Plone and SchoolTool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SchoolTool
Is there something even more comprehensive that's out there, suitable for college and university use? Does it come in modularized components? Is it an over-the-web database?
Nothing has come to my attention so far. There's no GLOBAL U app written in Django, ready for download and customization, complete with Students, Courses, Sections, Instructors, TAs, Scholarships, Supplies, Catalog, Users, Security... all the myriad relational tables and modules it'd take to turn this into a complete system, with maybe PostgreSQL for a back end (or another). I do think it'd be a boost for a university's reputation to have a lot of self sufficiency around its core business. Students could learn about the guts of the very systems that are used to run the university. Of course the actual data is protected in various ways (open source does not mean open data), but with pseudo-data students could work on enhancing and documenting in a collaborative environment. The mandate to "follow your curiosity" should extend into the heart of whatever system you're into, no? Learning how a university works is a great lesson in microcosm management, and could be a key to community development across the board, given how schools are akin to villages or towns (with sprawling network components, given distance education). Learn about the guts of a university in your formative years, and maybe you'll become a system architect for some semi-utopian oasis in a beleaguered world (yes, more inspiring rhetoric).
Or do few if any universities really eat their own dog food?
Like I say, I'm new to this business, just trying to get oriented.
Kirby
My tentative conclusion so far is a lot of universities were among the first to have mainframes and these were put to use to run the universities, a way of paying their own way (mainframes were and are quite expensive). What's happened more recently though, is as these first generations retire, more core functions are being outsourced to external vendors. Large cultural tides are at work. Another conclusion I've reached, and maybe this is well known in management circles, is that it would behoove large (and smaller) institutions to chronicle in-house lore, with an emphasis on the choices of technology. I'm getting some hits on Google (how self-documenting is Google (the company)?). This would be retrospective / historical information and not just "eyes only" to a few executives. A liberal arts institution, and/or a government of/by/for the people, might aim to be especially transparent in its operations as a matter of self definition and long term accreditability. Kirby More ruminations: http://controlroom.blogspot.com/2010/07/book-of-lore.html
participants (4)
-
Edward Cherlin -
Jarrod Millman -
Jurgis Pralgauskis -
kirby urner