The posting has two parts: the first part describes the past and current UNESCO FOSS activities and the second part suggests a new activity aimed at building an integrated FOSS Education solution targeting universities and that UNESCO may wish to initiate.

I. Brief Summary of UNESCO’s activities in FOSS For Education

1. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, promotes international cooperation and dissemination of knowledge in the field of education, sciences, culture and communication. Therefore the organization recognises that community approaches to software development in general, and FOSS in particular, have a very significant role to play. There are a number of activities undertaken by UNESCO in support to FOSS.
2. Free & Open Source Software Portal - The UNESCO Free and Open Source Software Portal was developed and published in November 2001. It is maintained by the Information Society Division and provides a one-stop access point to reference documents on the FOSS movements, as well as to websites hosting the most popular and useful FOSS packages in UNESCO’s fields of competence. The portal also mirrors the Free Software Directory, a joint project of UNESCO and FSF that catalogues useful free software that runs under free operating systems — particularly the GNU operating system and its GNU/Linux variants.
3. The Greenstone Digital Library (GSDL) - UNESCO has produced with the New Zealand Digital Library Project (NZDL) of the University of Waikato (New Zealand) and the Human Info NGO (Antwerp) a multi-lingual version of the Free and Open Source Greenstone Digital Library software suite. It is expected that the Greenstone software package will enable educational, scientific and cultural institutions worldwide to build and share compatible digital libraries of open access and public domain information. UNESCO makes available free of charge CD-ROMs containing Greenstone 2.70, documentation available in four “core” languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian) and documented examples of digital libraries and associated software. A feasibility study conducted by UNESCO suggested that the open source GSDL, associated with appropriate training and documentation, could constitute a unique resource in the implementation of digital libraries for Africa.
4. UNESCO assisted in the deployment of an open-source Learning Management System (LMS) at the Arab Open University in Bahrain, which was further replicated in Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
5. Together with UNDP, UNESCO also organised a consultative meeting of specialists to assess the needs of developing countries in terms of FOSS and on modalities to pursue an FOSS initiative for developing countries with special focus for Africa.
6. UNESCO has partnerships with FSF, the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) and various FOSS-active non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and is participating to the Latin American and Caribbean Conference on Free Software Development and Use (LACFREE). In addition UNESCO is informally collaborating with FAO, UNEP, UNDP and UNCTAD in promoting FOSS.
7. Other activities undertaken by UNESCO in support of FOSS are: development, distribution and translation of UNESCO FOSS software (CDS/ISIS – database software, IDAMS – statistical software).
8. Two discussion forums organized by UNESCO IIEP have focused on the related issues of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for e-learning (June 2004) and Open Educational Resources (OER): open content for higher education (October/November 2005). The FOSS and OER groups have continued to interact on a more informal basis as international Communities of Interest.
9. The Discussion forum on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Open Educational Resources organized by IIEP/UNESCO took place from 11 September to 6 October 2006. The main outcomes were the elaboration of a list of FOSS tools for OER development, management and dissemination, and the creation of a wiki collaboration space dedicated to the UNESCO IIEP Community of Interest on Open Educational Resources.
10. An Internet discussion forum aimed at discussing the OECD study on Open Educational Resources (OER) was held from 13 November to 1 December 2006.
11. Documentary on “Software for development: Documentary and Case Studies” - UNESCO contributed financially to this activity implemented by the UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme’s (UNDP-APDIP) International Open Source Network (IOSN) initiative, which aims to promote the choice of FOSS as affordable (yet effective) solutions for developing countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

II. UNESCO Activities envisaged and related to FOSS for EducationFOSS Education Solutions

1. Needs Analysis
   There is a strong demand for Free and Open Source Software solutions based upon open standards from developing and emerging countries who want to initiate secondary school and/or higher education computerization programs, as well as to computerize public administration. The ability to customize a solution to the special needs of a country, and any school or university in the country as well as using open standards, are the key advantages of providing open source solutions. It is usually quite easy to find FOSS applications that can solve a specific isolated problem such as an LMS or CMS, but most of the time a global solution is needed and there is really a lack of integrated FOSS solutions for education.
2. Vision
   In view of these needs, UNESCO would like to explore the possibility of producing a complete FOSS Education Solution for higher education that would integrate a stack of software tools, guidelines, and good documentation.
   A complete integrated FOSS Education Solution should be a technical roadmap with a stack of software tools and that could integrate for example:
   1. A Generic Integration Engine or Framework that:
   • Should solve the current Student Information System (SIS) problem
   • Add value by integrating isolated software tools and providing bridges
   • Allow flexibility to add more applications to the stack
   • Provide a seamless Education IT environment
   2. A Web Single SignOn (SSO) across or within organizational boundaries. It allows sites to make informed authorization decisions for individual access of protected online resources in a privacy-preserving manner.
      (Schibboleth — http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ )
   3. The Moodle Core
   • Course Management (search, create/edit/delete, classify, event management, etc …)
   • User Management (add/edit/delete, authenticate, enrol, grouping, etc…)
   • Configuration Management (general configuration, site configuration, language, module, etc…)
   • Teacher & Student functions (register, logon, teaching, learning, finding resources, etc…)
   4. The Education Management System (EMS)
   5. Guidelines and requirements for flexible IT Infrastructure
   6. Guidelines for planning, budgeting and implementing
   7. Step-by-step guide to implementing open distance learning.
3. Tentatively Skeleton for Project Management
   Projects are usually divided into eight phases. Each phase has an objective, associated documents and deliverables.Phase 1: The first phase intends to produce a Requirements Evaluation and Project Proposal document.
   Areas to be addressed include:
   • Fundamental Problem to be solved
   • Tasks/functions the FOSS Education Solution will perform
   • Benefits/Savings/Cost Justification
   • Economic
   • Contribution to EFA goals and objectives
   • Quality
   • Performance Requirements
   • Security
   • Compatibility/Migration
   • Product integration
   • Packaging
   • Related/Dependent Projects; Other Dependencies

   The project proposal document should set the background, define the fundamental concepts, compare and evaluate the alternate FOSS Education solutions in terms of functionality and compatibility, and should be accompanied by a thoughtful analysis of the current isolated FOSS Education Solutions and the desired integrated FOSS solution. It should also identify the missing components if any.

   Phase 2: Planning Phase
   Phase 3: Detailed Design Phase
   Phase 4: Construction Phase
   Phase 5: Testing Phase
   Phase 6: Implementation Phase
   Phase 7: User Support Phase
   Phase 8: Completion Phase

   Please note that this is a first attempt to design a project proposal for building a FOSS Education Solution targeting universities. It needs further improvement and elaboration. It could also be envisaged to build a FOSS Education Solution for secondary education (or K12).

I want to welcome Jean-Claude Dauphin and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software on Education series on Terra Incognita. His post will appear on June 27, 2007 (eastern U.S.). Jean-Claude will share some insights about UNESCO activities that promote the use of FOSS Solutions in Education. He will provide a brief description of past, current, and envisaged activities aimed at promoting the use of Free and Open Source Software solutions for Education.

Jean-Claude Dauphin works at UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, in the Information Society Division. He has a software developer background and contributes to the development and dissemination of UNESCO information processing tools such as the Open Source Greenstone Digital Library system (yet another great innovation from NZ). He is also in charge of the UNESCO Free and Open Source portal and a member of the team in charge of UNESCO “ICT in Education, Sciences and Culture” activities.

He is involved in activities related to Openness, and has a strong interest in FOSS Education solutions and open educational resources.

I am very much looking forward to Jean-Claude’s posting. I have for some time followed Jean-Claude’s work with FOSS with a strong appreciation for his significant contributions to FOSS, open standards, and their application in education. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

“Not IT, not Business Processes, but Organizational Culture,” the eighth installment of the Impact of Open Source Software Series, was scheduled on June 13th and posted on June 14th, 2007, by Craig Perue, who serves as the Programme Manager for eLearning@UWI. Thanks Craig!

Craig’s posting took the form of a story describing some of the challenges faced at the University of the West Indies while establishing and managing their online learning environment. He described the rationale for moving from a proprietary learning management system to Moodle, other migrations to open source software, and future plans to continue migrating from proprietary applications to Open Source Software (OSS) throughout the software stack. During the posting, Craig touched on the evaluation process, the areas where he thinks his institution delivers value and the role of OSS in creating value for learners, and some of the connections between organizational culture and the use of Free and Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS).

Comments
The comments that followed the posting were about “open source” teaching and open educational resources. Craig reflected on some of the definitions of learning design that were discussed in an earlier posting with James Dalziel, and talked about the conditions at his university that will either support or limit open and free content. He asked for suggestions about business models that will support universities that participate in open source teaching, to which Richard Wyles pointed him to some work that he has been doing with Moodle Networks. Finally, a question was floated about the faculty reaction to opening content at the largest college at UWI.

Thanks again to Craig, Richard Wyles, and all of the other folks who have been reading along. Our next posting will be by Jean-Claude Dauphin, Project Manager, Section for ICTs in Education, Science and Culture,Information Society Division, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO, on June 27, 2007. The schedule for the series can be found on WikiEducator.

Introduction

About one week before I joined the IT department of the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies (UWI) as the first staff member of Instruction Support Systems (ISS, the educational technology unit), I sat in a room with about twenty other persons, primarily faculty members, and was trained to use WebCT, as part of the forty or so persons on our campus to be so trained.

The next week I was put in charge of ensuring that faculty members across the campus adopted the system. That was May 2003. Four months later and two IT staff members richer, having worked long hard hours with faculty members on the Mona campus, we had about twenty four courses with over a thousand unique students ready to go for the start of the first semester.

Both the faculty members and I thought this was an immense success - but at that point I was informed that the University simply could not afford that many licenses. They wanted me to ask the faculty members to use another proprietary system with lesser functionality.

In apologizing to my clients, I assured them it would never happen again. I also told them plainly why it had happened, and why it would not recur. The reason it wouldn’t recur, of course, is because we would implement an open source replacement by the next semester. And that was how I came to receive permission from the IT Management team and the blessings of our faculty members to deploy the University’s first open-source enterprise system.

A little background on the University of the West Indies

With three campuses - Cave Hill (in Barbados), Mona (in Jamaica) and St Augustine (in Trinidad) in addition to twelve centres in the other contributing countries (known as the UWI-12), The University of the West Indies currently has a total enrollment of over 36,000 students and graduates annually approximately 5,800 students (at undergraduate, graduate and diploma levels).

Evaluation, Selection and Implementation

Below, I will suggest why I think higher education institutions ought to consider open-source software, but first let me quickly gloss over the evaluation, selection and implementation. Other than licensing regime – it had to be an open-source license, there were three other demands imposed by our particular circumstances.

1. Since WebCT was being aggressively implemented by the Distance Education Centre and the other two campuses, the replacement would need to be implemented as soon as possible to reduce the number of persons who would need to be re-trained for the entire University to adopt the FLOSS replacement.
2. Because the influential, tech-savvy first adopters across the University would be among the WebCT user base by the end of the first academic year, the replacement system would need to have a low learning curve relative to WebCT for these persons and at the same time provide additional value other than cost-savings (since their campuses could afford WebCT).
3. Although 2003 marked the official launch of the first University-wide LMS implementation, several other LMSs were already in use or proposed for use in 2003 by individual departments, and so any replacement system would need to provide an equivalent or more powerful set of features.

By early October 2003 the evaluation had begun with literature reviews, visits to other institutions, and discussions with faculty members and academic leaders to gather requirements. A few courses were deployed on WebCT to help us in the information gathering process.

The evaluation processes were very inclusive and the University-wide dialogue was facilitated in part by a discussion group on the development instance of Moodle. During the second semester, the consensus on the Mona campus was that we would deploy Moodle as the campus’s LMS, and we voiced our hope that the other campuses would follow as soon as summer of that year.

At Mona we led the indigenizing process by creating a UWI theme for the user interface, integrating it with our central authentication system, our homegrown Student Registration System, the email system, and later the Badging system (for photo IDs of staff and students). We also took the strategic decision to re-brand it, OurVLE, for Our Virtual Learning Environment.

The Long View

I acknowledge that there are situations in the Academy in which closed-source proprietary software is still the best choice, for example for my video editing staff and many of our multimedia production situations, although we continue to monitor the evolution of software applications like Jahshaka, MythTV, and Red5. However, I believe those situations are rapidly decreasing as more mature open-source software become available.

From a strategic perspective, there are very sound reasons within the Academy for adopting free (libre) open source software (FLOSS), that are far more important than short-to-medium-term cost savings. Three documents I read in 2003 were especially important influences on my thinking regarding open source software in education. The position I held before moving to the IT department was with the Office of the Board for Undergraduate Studies which included the University’s Quality Assurance Unit. Two of the documents are explicitly about quality: the Baldrige Education Criteria for Performance Excellence and Quality on the Line: Benchmarks for Success in Internet-Based Education. The other was Nicholas Carr’s article “IT Doesn’t Matter” which was published the very month I joined the IT department in May 2003.

My conclusion is different from Carr’s for good reasons. I concluded that publicly funded higher education institutions located in small developing economies that are vulnerable to numerous external forces, such as the UWI, needed to adopt FLOSS very soon. They need to become an active part of the developer community and help determine the relevant software application development roadmaps.

However, I agree with Carr that many information technologies will become commodities that do not confer competitive advantage. Further, as the higher education sector matures, with the incursions of non-traditional for-profit providers, the emergence of corporate universities, and the increasing prestige associated with credentials bestowed by professional associations, and the forces of globalization and regulation by the World Trade Organization, hyper-competition will drive higher education institutions to develop operational efficiencies we do not even imagine now.

Undoubtedly IT will be critical to realizing these operational efficiencies, but even more important will be designing the most efficient processes and systems to automate. However, much of what needs to be done to register a student and provide other student support services is straightforward and will not provide sustainable competitive advantages, as foreign business processes can be bought, brought into an organization, and implemented, as I have heard my colleagues complain for years about the Banner implementation.

How much competitive advantage is an institution likely to derive when it is using the same business processes as everyone else, and has the same cost structure, having bought the same closed-source software packages? Not much, I think. In fact, in time I believe those functions will be outsourced and higher education institutions (HEIs) will only keep for itself the student-, parent-, and alumni-facing functions. These “customer” facing functions are what will allow one HEI to differentiate itself from the others, and the development of a powerful, distinct brand. Some of these functions include:

1. Course design and some aspects of course development
2. Teaching, tutoring, facilitation of student learning
3. Marketing and Communication

It is for the effective delivery of these two first functions why involvement in the FLOSS communities will matter so much for HEIs. For a large, traditional university with a well-established full-time faculty interested in teaching, much like the UWI is, it would make very little sense to outsource course design or teaching, tutoring, or facilitation of student learning, since:

1. Our teachers know our students better than anyone else and this knowledge can be developed into a competitive advantage for designing courses for them, provided that knowledge is complemented by generic teaching skills, constantly supplemented by teaching scholarship and research, and very importantly by information and communication technologies (ICTs) that allow for rapid adaptation of learning objects, and learning designs. I submit that these ICTs have to be FLOSS, since modifying the tools themselves will be a part of the core business of the University, that is, advancing the technology for teaching and learning. Some aspects of course development, such as the development of web pages and illustrative graphics are not complex and so can be readily outsourced if it is cost-effective. However, some types of learning objects can be quite complex and effective and the organization’s ability to rapidly develop and adapt them could conceivably become a source of competitive advantage.
2. Teaching, tutoring, facilitation of student learning are way too little understood and complex at present, to be automated. The complexity and difficulty provides an opportunity for the organization to develop deep smarts in that area which can be leveraged for competitive advantage, so outsourcing is an unattractive option. Additionally, since teaching is believed to be one of the most effective means of stimulating learning in the student-turned-teacher, I believe that peer-to-peer and small group teaching and learning will become a larger part of our pedagogical practice, and this too will drive the demand for a wider variety of teaching and learning technology tools. As Ruth Sabean pointed out in the first post in this series, a ‘developer culture‘ in the HEI facilitates this kind of activity and reliance on external software companies to facilitate that kind of faculty and student-driven innovation is unlikely to be as successful.

Probably for all HEIs, but especially for those with tightly constrained budgets, it is critical to find existing open-source applications to build on to get the maximum impact from in-house developers’ time and energy. In the long term then, acceptance of FLOSS in the Academy is essential to support innovation in teaching and learning. Below, I will go into the reasons it is necessary to adopt FLOSS now rather than later.

Organizational Culture

Open source software is not incidental to my unit’s business model; for very deliberate reasons it is at the very heart of the way we do business.

As professionals we are defined by others by the services we provide them and our relationships with them. Our tools are key to enabling us to provide those services and affect the quality of the services we can provide. It is important therefore to choose tools that empower us as IT professionals, and allow us to serve our clients well and empower them. In designing Instruction Support Systems in 2003, it was my goal to design a unit that would function as a trusted advisor and strategic partner to the UWI teaching and learning community. I believe/d FLOSS was essential to realizing that vision.

In contrast, in quite a number of IT departments in our Caribbean organizations, including our HEIs, IT staff simply install proprietary software and provide Help Desk type support to their clients. This is especially the case for smaller and younger organizations. For most small organizations, because proprietary closed-source software closes off the very possibility in many cases for changing software to meet particular organizational needs, clients learn not to ask for modifications and IT staff learn not to encourage clients to think too much about their particular needs, needs which would be expensive to meet with such license regimes. (In fact one of my Deans still occasionally reminds me I tried to get him to use WebCT.) In some ways then, proprietary closed-source software is fundamentally disempowering. Of course this is not the case for software that meets or exceeds your needs. Also, it is not only license regimes that disempower IT staff and the entire organization; poorly documented or architected software, regardless of license also has a disempowering effect, as does lack of appropriate IT skills for both end users and IT staff.

However, what I am interested in getting at is the significant empowering effects of FLOSS in the enterprise and the enormous positive impacts on organizational culture.

FLOSS gives us the power to say to faculty members and other clients, “imagine what you want, think it through and tell me on Monday morning.” On Monday, we can sit with them in their office, discuss their requirements, and maybe even show them a demo application hosted on a virtual machine somewhere in the data centre. We can continue to refine requirements, timelines and required resources, and if need be, discuss honestly why it is not feasible to do it until next year or the year after or the next decade.

Clients may be disappointed, but they feel empowered because they know the default response to their requests is “let’s talk about it.” And we can afford that response not because we have an army of developers to throw at any problem, but because the riches of the open source community is now a University resource. (However, I do not mean to suggest that the majority of University staff are already so empowered that the rate of requests is at the desired level. We need to do more marketing and capacity building.) I am very happy that I do not have to worry about my clients rejecting an open-source application because of a stigma attached. Except for the more tech-savvy clients who want to know that the applications they are using are open-source, few clients raise the issue of the license type.

It is relatively straight-forward too to see how involvement in the FLOSS community allows me to rapidly align or re-align the IT unit with the organization’s strategic goals. Not having to worry about adding to the significant software license burden (which are called mandatory costs here at UWI), long procurement periods, context-free vendor presentations, political jockeying with other units for scarce resources, means I can get the software installed with at least three times the efficiency and even greater responsiveness to changes in organizational priorities, than if I were trying to use equivalent proprietary software in most instances. This has allowed us to focus some of that saved attention on implementing proper control and service management frameworks using the Control Objectives for IT (COBIT) and the ITIL Service Management framework.

What really excites me too is that using open-source software allows me to co-imagine and implement an academic IT architecture that we could never afford to implement using proprietary equivalents. Here is a list of some of the server applications we have been working with since August 2006 and expect to work on for another two years. I look forward to discussing other possible choices with you.

Finally, and probably best of all, FLOSS allows me to give my staff interesting work to do and allows them to be creative in developing both deep technical skills and client relationship skills that will serve them well wherever in IT they choose to work.

I look forward to discussing some of these issues with you.

I want to welcome Craig Perue and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software on Education series. Craig’s post will appear on Terra Incognita on June 13, 2007 (eastern U.S.). Craig will share some of his experiences while leading eLearning@UWI’s investments in open-source software to make eLearning a self-sustaining, across all of the campuses of the 15-country University of the West Indies.

Craig Perue was appointed as the first staff member in the Instruction Support Systems unit in the IT department of the largest University of the West Indies campus in 2003. Craig was responsible for stimulating faculty adoption of WebCT which was being implemented across the University that year. The programme was so successful that the campus outstripped its budget for WebCT licenses which then allowed Craig to lead the evaluation of open source alternatives and one of the largest early implementations of moodle (15,000 students) in January 2004. As the manager of the campus’s educational technology practice, he led the campus’s re-branding and development of moodle as OurVLE and the campus’s migration away from WebCT, as well as the successful evangelization of moodle throughout the University and the English-speaking Caribbean.

I am very much looking forward to Craig’s posting. Having gone through a similar exercise with Richard Wyles and the eLearning team at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, I appreciate the process of evaluating OSS options and migrating learning management systems. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.

I have been attending the National University Telecommunication Network (NUTN) annual meeting in Philadelphia, and due to a missed flight by the keynote presenter, Dr. David Cavallo co-leader of MIT Media Lab’s Future of Learning, Ene Tammeoru of the Estonian e-Learning Development Centre affiliated with the Estonian e-University and I were rescheduled to open the meeting. Ene talked about a multi-organizational e-learning partnership composed of Estonian universities and technical schools that she leads. The project is 4 years old and its purpose is to develop sustainable infrastructure ranging from technology to faculty development. I provided a more general presentation on some considerations associated with selecting activities that make sense. The main ideas were that:

• International activities do not have to start and stop at delivering or extending educational programmes to international students, but can include involvement in OSS, OER, and open communities of practice.
• Activities can be aligned within the context of global tends, institutional mission, and capacity.

Please feel free to check out the presentation materials, update, share, comment, etc.

View the presentation in PowerPoint format.