10.1 Not it, not business processes, but organizational culture  (Page 2/13)

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.