12.1 Open source software and the user experience in higher education

Open source software and the user experience in higher education

Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 by Mara Hancock

Open source software has moved up the technology stack. We are now seeing consumer software such as Content Management, Learning Management, Portals, and other Web 2.0 tools all emerging directly out of open and community source efforts which provide unique opportunities for higher education to address the unique needs of their academic constituencies. But do we have what it takes to do this successfully? Do we have the right skills in our development shops? Can we bridge the divide created by distributed development teams to make for meaningful and seamless applications that will meet the work flows of all our users? How does the fact that we are in a teaching and learning environment impact that work and the methods we apply? This blog entry may be destined to ask more questions than I can answer! I hope that at the very least it might help to instigate a healthy dialog, illicit some emerging best practices from open and community source communities and from our — often less visible — local environments.

Let me enter into this conversation by way of a brief introduction to the work that has influenced my thinking in this area.

UC Berkeley has been actively working on Sakai since early 2005, when it was solely a grant and University funded project. We continue to be actively involved as it transitions to a full-fledged open source foundation model. I have been on the Sakai board of directors through this time. We are also a core member on the Fluid Project , recently funded by the Mellon Foundation , along with the University of Toronto (PI), Cambridge University, York University, UBC, and experts in usability, accessibility, and UI design across the globe. This community source project was created to focus on addressing the precarious value of UI and accessibility design in community and open source development work. In addition, UC Berkeley will be a core partner on the upcoming Kuali Student Project , which, as a project, has boldly declared a determination to be user-centered from day one. As you can see, as an organization UC Berkeley is deeply embedded in – and increasingly reliant on – open source applications, and in particular the community source projects, to deliver critical and integral functionality to our student and instructors every day. If these users – the heart and soul of our university’s endeavors – cannot use these tools to successfully fulfill their goals we are not doing our jobs.