Thursday, July 15, 2004
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Universities to Release Free Course-Management SoftwareBy JEFFREY R. YOUNG
A cooperative venture by several major universities to build free course-management software is expected to release the first version of its product today, together with the complete source code, so that any college or individual can customize and enhance the program. The effort, called the Sakai Project, named for a chef on a popular cable-television cooking show, could draw business away from commercial vendors -- mainly Blackboard Inc., which went public this year, and WebCT Inc. -- that sell similar software to thousands of colleges worldwide. But even the developers of the new software concede that Version 1.0, which will be available free from the project's Web site, is not a mature product, and that they do not expect many colleges to use Sakai extensively until Version 2.0 is released next summer. The developers hope that colleges will kick the tires of the initial release and begin to build tools that can be added to the system. To encourage just such a reaction, the developers started the Sakai Educational Partners Program, which now has 44 institutions, including 7 foreign colleges, as members. They each pay $10,000 per year to get advance releases of the software and to be part of a community of college developers. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, one of four institutions leading the software-development effort, has agreed to use the software campuswide this fall. The other three leaders -- Indiana University at Bloomington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford University -- have pledged to begin using the software across their campuses by the fall of 2005. "One thing that distinguishes us from any other open-source project is our commitment to eat our own dog food," said Amitava (Babi) Mitra, executive director of academic-media production services for MIT. That every professor at MIT will be asked to use the software, he said, means that the institute has an unusual incentive to make sure the software is well built. Many colleges have come to rely on course-management systems to create Web pages for courses, to hold online class discussions, and for other communications among students and faculty members. The other partner institutions will not necessarily switch to Sakai, however. They are planning to evaluate the software or run small pilot tests, for now. Sakai is a Frankensteinian creation, stitched together from the computer code of existing course-management software developed at the four lead universities, as well as from uPortal software, a Web-based application made up of open-source-software parts created by several hundred universities. Drawing on existing software allowed the developers to craft a complex program in just six months. Some college officials see Sakai as a declaration of independence from commercial providers, many of which have raised the prices of their products substantially over the past few years. But others wonder whether open-source course-management software will be stable enough and will contain enough features to stack up to commercial products that have been under development since the late 1990s. And even though the Sakai software is free, it comes with costs, since it takes staff time to install, customize, and maintain. It is too soon to say whether Sakai will succeed, say several college leaders who have seen demonstrations of the new software. But even if it is a flop, the project might pressure commercial course-management makers to be more responsive to customer complaints. The vision of Sakai's creators is to collectively harness the software development already under way at many colleges, which have long counted on homegrown software to help support teaching and research, but generally have not distributed the software beyond their own campuses. The project has an unusual amount of backing for a university-led software effort, having won a $2.4-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a $300,000 grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The four lead universities have pledged about $1-million each in staff time, with several programmers at each institution working full time on Sakai. Even so, a major focus of the effort is to involve enough colleges that will use and develop the software on an informal basis that the project will be self-sustaining within three years, even without continued grant support. Joseph B. Hardin, head of the Sakai Project's board and director of the University of Michigan's Collaborative Technologies Laboratory, said he hopes that working together on software will become routine behavior for colleges. For instance, if campus software developers wanted a better tool for professors to record and submit grades online, they would go to a Sakai discussion forum to find out what grade-book tools had been built by others. If they found one they liked, they could simply download it and plug it into their system. Or they could create their own and make it available free to any other campus that wanted to use it. Such a model has worked for other open-source software, like Linux, a computer-operating system. If hundreds of colleges adopted Sakai, that would mean hundreds of programmers available to develop the software. And that means, according to Mr. Hardin, that by next year's release of Version 2.0, Sakai will be "at least as good" as any commercial course-management system. Bob Taylor, director of academic technologies at Northwestern University, said he would love to see a viable open-source alternative to expensive course-management systems, which are known as CMS's. But he also hopes that Sakai has a more-immediate effect: to prompt commercial vendors to make their software more open so that colleges can more easily customize it. "One scenario is that some of the commercial CMS vendors could decide to build compliance" with Sakai, he said, meaning that their software would operate seamlessly with Sakai software. Northwestern uses Blackboard's course-management software. The company has developed a system, called Building Blocks, that lets colleges build add-on features, but Mr. Taylor said the system does not allow college officials as much access to Blackboard's source code as they would like. WebCT allows customization of its software, but some of its customers say they would like to see the company be more open, too. "Blackboard and WebCT have not quite figured out how to do graceful interoperability" with the software developed by colleges, said Mr. Taylor. A major goal of the Sakai project's leaders is to help control the rising cost of commercial course-management software. "One of the things that open source has done is cap the price they can ask" by giving colleges an alternative, said Jim Farmer, director of Sakai's partner program. Meanwhile, officials of Blackboard and WebCT say they are hoping to work with Sakai. "In general, we support the vision and the activities of Sakai," said Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard. "We have had conversations with Sakai's leadership. ... We have very much expressed our strong desire to join the program." The company is willing to make its software interoperative with Sakai's, Mr. Pittinsky said, although making the necessary changes would take time. "It's not a question of vision or desire," he said. "It takes time to get new releases out." Chris Vento, chief technology officer of WebCT, also expressed a desire to form a partnership with Sakai. The company is open to altering its programs to make it compatible with the new open-source software, he said. "We will definitely assess what they have and try to perform some level of interoperability with it." Sakai's leaders say they are still deciding whether they will form such partnerships, and are asking for proposals from any company that wants to join the project. Already they have named four "commercial affiliates" -- Embanet, the RSmart Group, SunGuard SCT, and Unicon -- that plan to offer user support for a fee. "The Sakai commercial-affiliates program has been designed to grow as commercial interests want to work with the Sakai project," said Bradley Wheeler, vice chairman of Sakai's board and associate vice president for research and academic computing at Indiana University. Are Blackboard and WebCT worried about colleges' dropping commercial products in favor of Sakai? No, say both Mr. Pittinsky and Mr. Vento. For one thing, while open-source software is free, it can be costly to install and maintain, they say. And by buying a commercial product, they argue, colleges can be sure that programmers are available to offer support and to keep the software stable. "If you're the chief information officer of a university looking at an application that is going to be used by every student and every instructor," Mr. Pittinsky said, "you will want to call up a vendor and know that you'll have their support in a very structured way." Affordability is certainly "a critical issue" for users of course-management software, said Mr. Pittinsky, but commercial software might still be cheaper for colleges to use than Sakai, he maintained. "A typical license to a Blackboard learning system is less than a [programmer's salary] in an IT shop that is trying to build an alternative or make one of the community-source products work for their specific needs," he said. He acknowledged that his company had altered how it had priced its software several times in recent years -- meaning higher costs for some colleges -- but said he expects pricing to remain more consistent in the future. "It's going to be a lot more predictable over time the way pricing will move," he said. Mr. Vento, of WebCT, said most colleges do not have enough information-technology staff members to provide the support needed for programs like Sakai's. "There's a select set of potential customers that are capable of dealing with an open-source initiative," he said. College officials agree that open-source software always comes with indirect costs, and many officials at colleges working with Sakai say the most exciting thing about the open-source model is the potential for innovation rather than savings. When college officials from Sakai's 44 partner institutions held a meeting in Denver last month, two forthcoming features of the software generated the most buzz: an advanced online grade book and an online testing tool. Officials say both of them appear to contain features that are more advanced or more flexible than those offered in commercial products. Some say Sakai will have to develop compelling features if colleges are going to switch from what they are using now because migration will be difficult and will require retraining faculty members. But even when presented with attractive new features, some college officials say they are too entrenched to make a switch in course-management systems. "Open source would have been a great thing a few years ago, when we were making hard decisions about this," said Anthony F. Turrin, online-learning-technology coordinator for the University of North Florida. It chose Blackboard, and despite occasional frustrations has no plans to switch to Sakai, he said. "We're not looking at it at this point," Mr. Turrin said, "mainly because we have a course-management tool that faculty are happy with and provides a functionality that they're looking for."
Background articles from The Chronicle:
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Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education