Real Open Source Applications for Education? 185
openeducation writes "I have been researching open source solutions for K-12 education pretty heavily for the past year and have been disappointed to find no real alternatives to the large administrative applications like student information systems, data warehouse, ERP, etc. But recently, I ran across Open Solutions for Education. This group appears to be making a serious effort at creating a stack of open source applications that are alternatives to the large and costly commercial packages. Centre, an open source student information system that has been around for a while, is part of the solution stack. They have a data warehouse and are proposing an open source SIF alternative and an assessment solution. While the proof is in the pudding, these guys have working demos and they look pretty good for a first run. K-12 education is in dire financial straits and solutions like these could help with lower TCO. Plus, education is a collaborative industry already, which makes it a good fit for open source."
Necessary? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Necessary? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
Collaborative k-12? (Score:3, Insightful)
While higher level educations may poke around with the source code and contribute, I would say that in general open source doesn't have any special appeal for K-12. Most teachers are more concerned with getting their students to pass the next state/national test, writing lesson plans, wrangling parents and students, and generally doing education to worry about the software behind it all. They just need the software to work (TM). Open sauce may be cheaper, but in the end the districts will get what they need to educate not what will "stick it to the man" or whatever.
Re:Great (Score:1, Insightful)
What is needed is open or inexpensive books! (Score:5, Insightful)
The book industry is a huge SCAM.
Writing open english,math,science and more advanced books would help the pocketbook and make education more affordable.
Hell,there are cheaper books at Barnes and Noble & Borders than the bookscams pushed by the schools.
Re:Great (Score:5, Insightful)
EDU decision makers != sensible (Score:2, Insightful)
Add to that all the No Child Allowed To Get Ahead crap... the NCLB is just the latest trend in class warfare. It backs public schools into a corner with impossible to meet requirements. It's like expecting pole vaulters to keep clearing the bar no matter how high up you move it. But the invevitable "failures" will lead to School Vouchers.
I hope everyone realizes that School Vouchers won't allow anyone to attend better schools, it will just allow the already wealthy enough class to get subsidies for the private schools they already attend. Then the middle and lower classes will see their education system really go to shit. The corporations will come in licking their chops, and pretty soon all the poor people will learn is to drink Coke and eat at McDonalds.
You think education is expensive? Try ignorance...
What a convenient alias you have! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a shame! I use OpenOffice for all my lecture notes, slides, etc. and very few of my students know what it is or try it out (despite my encouragement at the start of term). I had hoped that my students would jump at the chance for something free! I did find out what I think the reason is though. Apparently the province has done some deal with MS for all schools and universities so that MS office only costs students (and profs apparently) ~$20.
On the course management side the University encouraged me to use the central WebCT server but on my first try several years ago with Firefox on Linux I got the message "Your browser is not supported, please upgrade to Internet Explorer". After I stopped laughing I looked for OpenSource equivalents and found Moodle which was trivial to install on my Linux desktop and which I now use for all my courses because I find it a LOT better than WebCT (as do my students according to several questionnaires).
As a "costly commercial package" engineer... (Score:3, Insightful)
When you sit down and compare the value you are getting, I think you will be surprised how favorably the commercial solutions compare.
The top 3 considerations will probably be support, services, and state reporting.
The largest cost in many of these packages is the services and support component. In this respect, open source or not is largely irrelevant unless you are planning to do support and services in house. But that means supporting a product that you have limited training on, and have very limited familiarity with the codebase of. And unless you plan on doing 1st tier support on up personally, you'll be hiring additional people on staff. Add their salaries into the bid.
If you'll be relying on the vendor, they you have a different set of questions. What kind of response level does the open source provider guarantee? Do they have the staffing and budget to fly technicians and trainers out same day or next day? Can they provide the level of support your district needs? Remember, if the system inexplicably goes down printing report cards the night before parent teacher conferences, the school board isn't going to let you off the hook because you saved a few bucks by going open source.
The other place you are likely to be burned is State Reporting. The reporting requirements in many states are so elaborate that it is only by economies of scale that a vendor can afford to provide and support compliant implementations. The complexity of these requirements are increasing as the state and federal governments want information in more detail, and the requirements change every year. Does this open source provider even have an implementation for state reporting in your state? Does it satisfy the data privacy regulations of your state? Does it support the internal data auditing requirements of your state? Will your auditor agree?
And if it doesn't have a state reporting implementation for your state, how much value does it really provide you, and how will it need to integrate into your existing process in terms of export and import?
If I were starting a student information system from scratch like a lot of these open source solutions are trying to do, I would start in a single state with modest state reporting requirements and target small schools. The customization needs you are going to start seeing even in 5000 student districts will quickly leave you in need of a large services and support organization (or business partners to provide the same), only you won't benefit from the economies of scale the established vendors do. "We'll offer the same product and services as big vendor X, only we'll do it for less!" is generally a non-starter as a business plan. Probably you are going to be looking either to be bought out by one of these established vendors (not a good strategy in the current market), or targeting a niche market, such as sub-5000 student districts, or even sub-1000 student districts.
Re:Great (Score:3, Insightful)
The PDF editing / commenting / markup workflow in Adobe Acrobat Professional is actually pretty good, if you can afford the price tag. It lets you take PDFs and basically do everything you'd want to do to paper documents with them, including passing them around to reviewers and condensing various reviewers' notes down into one final version for review by the author; even does nice digital signatures and authentication (and it has built-in OCR for converting scans to searchable PDFs)
I think it's marketed almost solely to corporations who want to work paperlessly/electronically, and can afford to issue everyone a copy at $450 each.
The technology is there, it's just that frankly there isn't enough demand for the "paperless office" to really make it happen. If you're in the same building, it's a whole lot easier to just print the document out and go to town on it with a $0.30, red felt-tip pen, than to use a bunch of software to clumsily approximate the same thing.
Paper is cheap, software, and implementing software, is expensive. The current systems just aren't broken enough for most people to want to fix them.
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Necessary? (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a comment that is out of touch. Teachers do not get paid that much, especially considering the level of education, continuing education, work requirements and out of pocket professional expenses most teachers have. My wife is an assistant manager of a small woman's clothing store. SHe makes more money than most teachers do!
No, the problem with where the money goes in education has very little to do with how much teachers get paid. It has something to do with unfunded mandates and administrative overhead. Have you ever sat down and read through your local school systems annual budget. I have. It is interesting reading. Those little things like you will provide all day kindergarden, but you have to come up with the money. Things like you will provide free meals, and we will provide half the money. Sports are another big money item. In most cases, they cost far more than they bring in (including football, basketball and baseball). Then, for many schools, there are now security issues - normally at the locations that have the least available to spend anyway.
On top of that, there is all of the required record keeping. Do you have any idea how much that costs? And, there are special education children that can cost as much as 100 times that of a normal student - in our system, they used to be left out. It is good to include them, but the money has to come from somewhere. In many US schools now, we have a problem with non-english speaking students and parents. That adds another large cost.
The list goes on and on and on... Many teachers work as much in 8 months as most people do in 16 months. They work when at school, they work before hours, the work after hours, they work on weekends. They put up with stupid parents (someday, a group of teachers ought to write a book about the parents they have to deal with) and their children. They keep trying. Most of them for less than 60% of what a person with a similar educational background would earn. Here, a starting teacher is in the low $20k with a masters degree.
And if you think teaching is easy, you really need to try doing it for a few years. It is one of the hardest jobs you can take up. Most people judge teachers by what they saw while being a student. Kind of like judging an iceberg by that little part that sits above water.
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