10.1 Not it, not business processes, but organizational culture

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.