OSS and LMS

I've been reflecting recently on the subject of open courseware and, more specifically, OpenCourseWare following the keynote for the Sakai conference in Amsterdam delivered confidently and enthusiastically by Hal Abelson (a podcast is available). In this post I'll briefly recap some of the core aspects as I understand them and then go on to explore this area, based on personal experiences and ideas I've been formulating at Oxford.

OSS Watch, the UK's non-partisan advice service on open-source software and open standards, have just published a survey report last week about software use in UK higher education.

The survey, carried out in February-March 2006, reports on the take-up of open-source software (OSS) in UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) institutions. By default, it also gives a picture of the NON-takeup of open-source solutions. The survey is based on data collected from nearly 1 in 5 UK institutions (18%), making it a useful information baseline from which to extract trends and make future predictions.

There's a lot of good reading in the report, but the thing that interests me most is that it shows that there is currently no clear leader amongst Content Management Systems (CMS) in UK HE. Why is this?

Stuart and Paul will probably have opinions about this :-) What follows is my 2p worth. (NB: Stuart responded before I could upload the rest of my post -- however I think we agree on many points).

One argument for diversity in e-learning systems and services for higher education is that instutions are themselves diverse, and have specific needs – particularly in relation to pedagogy. But is this really true? Are the needs of HEIs actually that diverse? If we look at the range of software in use within HE, we see that within particular domains, a handful of commercial providers dominates the landscape: such as Oracle’s PeopleSoft within administrative services; or Microsoft’s Windows Explorer for staff/student web access. Indeed, the OSS survey report shows that Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer are deployed by all institutions on most desktops. And this software is not necessarily restricted to administrative functions: for example, web browsers and email applications are commonly used within teaching and research practice, too.