Friday, December 6, 2002

Foothill College Will Build Its Own Next-Generation Courseware, and Offer It to Others By FLORENCE OLSEN Foothill College will build rather than buy its next generation of software for managing online learning, and it is creating an alliance of other colleges that are willing to share some of the costs in exchange for free use of the software and its source code. In doing so, Foothill is bucking a trend in which many colleges have turned away from homegrown courseware -- the new favorite term is "learning-management system," or LMS -- in favor of buying commercial systems from a handful of companies. "We like to be in the forefront and support faculty who are innovative," says Vivian Sinou, Foothill's dean of distance and mediated learning. Building such a system could end up costing Foothill more than it would spend to buy one from Blackboard or WebCT, two of the leading companies in the education-software industry, Ms. Sinou says. But officials of the two-year college, located in California's Silicon Valley, are confident that an alliance of institutions can create the kind of learning-management system that their faculty members want -- and can avoid the unpredictable price increases that colleges encounter in the commercial market. Currently, says Ms. Sinou, colleges are "being held hostage to the industry, and the costs are only going up." Foothill won't be starting from scratch but will be creating a new and more robust version of its existing homegrown system, called Etudes, created eight years ago by a computer-science professor who teaches at Foothill. The alliance has begun its work on the new version, Etudes2, which it expects to finish in about two years. Whether Foothill can attract more than a handful of like-minded colleges to the alliance remains to be seen. Eight have joined so far. For colleges that already are heavily invested in one of the commercial systems, "there's a big disincentive to change," says Larry Toy, president and chief executive officer of the Foundation for California Community Colleges, which administers a nationwide purchasing cooperative. On the other hand, he says, "if the pain is too high in terms of cost, then you may be willing to change." A top-of-the-line version of WebCT, for example, can initially cost a college as much as $300,000. Younger instructors who are quite comfortable with the Web want to do things that are impossible with the current Etudes, Ms. Sinou says. For example, they would like a system that could link a student's electronic transcript to an electronic portfolio of the student's work -- research papers, artwork, and the like. Ms. Sinou says that some companies are considering adding e-portfolios to their learning-management systems but that she has not seen it happen yet. Most online-learning systems lack student services, such as tutoring, help-desk support, and academic counseling. "All of that could be integrated, and those are some of the areas that we are exploring," Ms. Sinou says. Etudes began in the mid-1990s as a small project of Michael Loceff, a computer-science instructor at Foothill who developed the software to make himself more efficient at teaching courses online. About two years ago, Mr. Loceff created a small company, Jamboa Learning Technologies, in Seattle, to commercialize the software. But the company was a failure, Mr. Loceff says, and he gave Foothill all rights to the software in 2001. Mr. Loceff still teaches 12 online courses a year with 30 to 50 students per course in Foothill's Global Access program. He is also helping design Etudes2. But he does so from Los Angeles, where he is a television writer and producer for Fox Network's 24, a counterterrorism drama. "I have a double life," he says. Currently, about 25,000 students take courses that use Etudes, including 9,800 at Foothill and the rest at three other institutions. "We feel the model that we have begun, which is a model supported by very, very small license fees, has worked to allow Foothill to support a handful of campuses already, and that we can continue that model," Mr. Loceff says. Donald D. Megill, a music instructor at MiraCosta College who uses Etudes in his online teaching, says that he will stick with it and will contribute to the new generation of the software, which will be created with Microsoft's .NET programming technology. Community-college districts that join Foothill's Etudes2 LMS Alliance would pay an annual membership fee of $10,000 for five years, but would pay no additional license fee for Etudes2 when the new software is released, says Ms. Sinou, who is the project manager for Etudes2. Single institutions with a full-time enrollment of at least 18,001 students would pay an $8,000 annual membership fee. Smaller colleges would pay proportionately less. Ms. Sinou strongly favors alliances. "Higher education for the longest time has not enjoyed strong base funding to do creative and innovative things, and right now is tougher than ever," she says. "It is only the right thing for colleges and institutions to collaborate." Any college that joins the Foothill alliance can request a free license for the current version of Etudes until the new version is released. Any of the 108 colleges in the California Community Colleges system that join the alliance can also take advantage of a free service for running the Etudes software on servers maintained by the California Virtual Campus. The California Virtual Campus comprises five state-financed regional centers set up to help colleges develop online courses and programs. In three years, the number of online courses offered by California community colleges, including Foothill, has gone from fewer than 500 to more than 2,000, according to Paul Myers, a regional director for the virtual campus. As an incentive, Ms. Sinou says, colleges that join the alliance before December 31 will receive a 50-percent discount on all future annual membership fees. Individual faculty members whose colleges are not members of the alliance and who are interested in Etudes for their own courses can join the alliance for an annual membership fee of $250. More information is available at the alliance's Web site. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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