I want to welcome Rob Abel and thank him for agreeing to contribute to the Impact of Open Source Software and Open Educational Resources on Education series on Terra Incognita. His post is scheduled to appear on September 19, 2007 (eastern U.S.). In this posting, Rob will relay a few thoughts on the relationship between open source software that supports teaching and learning and open standards for data and application interoperability in the same space. It is a brief synopsis of “possible lessons learned so far” based on two years of experience. Rob reserves the right to evolve or change these lessons based on future experience.
Already a veteran Silicon Valley high tech entrepreneur, Rob Abel entered the world of educational technology in 1999 by joining Collegis (now SunGard Higher Education), the leading provider of information, academic, and online technology services in the U.S. higher education market. Prior to joining Collegis, he was responsible for development of products and services for online learning at Oracle. In 2004 Rob founded the Alliance for Higher Education Competitiveness (A-HEC) to conduct research on best practices in the use of technology in education. One study conducted near the end of 2005 looked specifically at the level and types of adoption of open source in the U.S. higher education market, sponsored by Sun, SCT, and Unicon. The report on this unique study is available online at the A-HEC Open Source Software Research site. In February 2006 Rob was appointed as the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium (IMS GLC), a non-profit member consortium that have been focused on developing specifications and standards for interoperability exclusively in the learning sector for now over eleven years. Participation in IMS GLC includes an annual report on Learning Impact: Trends in Learning, Technology, and Standards. This report was inspired by the need to “connect the dots” between new and innovative learning technologies and the key global challenges of education leaders across sectors. IMS GLC has featured tracks on open technologies in its annual conference each of the last two years.
I am very much looking forward to Rob’s posting, which promises to build on the great dialog that was generated during the past months on the Series. Although open standards have been mentioned in a number of posts, we have not dedicated much time to specifically discussing their impact on OSS and OER relating to education. In addition, the standards development process is one of much interest. Please feel free to comment, ask questions, build on the conversation, and enjoy.
Author - Rob Abel, "Open Source and Open Standards". Originally submitted September 19th, 2007 to the OSS and OER in Education Series, Terra Incognita blog (Penn State World Campus), edited by Ken Udas.
About 18 months ago, in February of 2006 I was appointed the CEO of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. IMS is a non-profit member consortium focused on developing open standards for interoperability in the domain of learning and education. My sense was that open source software was an important trend in this domain, especially in the higher education segment. I had some fairly recent exposure to higher ed open source in the U.S. having just completed a research study on current usage and prospective usage. In discussions with the IMS Board of Directors, which included at the time several providers of non-open source solutions (and still does, by the way) there was confirmation on the importance of including open source initiatives in the open standards discussion. Since then IMS has included open source and open technology program tracks in our annual conference and added a couple of open source leaders, Moodle (course management platform) and INFORMS (student and administrative system platform), in addition to some existing participation from the Sakai community, to our active participants.
I’ve also been involved in several invited presentations and panel discussions with some other very smart folks on the topic of open source and open technologies in both the higher ed and K-12 school segments. Through an accumulated experience of two years looking at open source and open standards and how they can, will, or might impact the learning technology segment, I have, at least initially, concluded a few things about open source, open standards and the relationship between them. Since we have a long way to go, I’m offering these as postulates that need to be proven. Here goes:
I think the greatest proof point of this is probably Apache – the availability of an authoritative reference model while organizations are attempting to adopt new interoperability standards is invaluable in accelerating industry participation. In learning standards, our conundrum is conformance.
One of my favorite sayings of the month is, “learning technology interoperability standards – great for researchers or consultants, bad for interoperability.” The point being that pretty much all the specifications developed over the last ten years of progress are well, not very specific. Ethernet they are not. This, above all, in my opinion and in the opinion of many IMS members is the single largest reason that much very good work has been thwarted in terms of its potential for adoption.
As a result, IMS is doing a bunch of things under the name of “application profiling” to narrow down spec parameters for various communities – either by region or segment. We are also providing value to our members in bringing them together in various ways to support testing. But, while this is helpful, is there anything more efficient then the ability to build to an authoritative reference design?
Some very successful open source initiatives leveraged existing investment in operating systems, web servers, etc. making the decision of what interfaces to implement pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, in end-user applications, and especially in education and learning, that prior investment doesn’t usually exist.
One of my very repeatable conversations with new open source project X begins with: “OK, Rob, just tell us what standards you have and then we can adopt them.” To which I reply, “well, if you want them to exist you need to help create them.” Let’s take course management systems as an example. Who defines the interoperability interface points between a course management system and other complementary components in what we like to call the “learning enterprise?” There is no obvious answer to that question.
If an open source initiative for learning wants to be on the cutting edge of defining that “enterprise architecture,” well, then it needs to be involved in the standards creation and evolution. Another very repeatable conversation with open source initiative X goes like this, “well, Rob, we are implementing open source interfaces and therefore we are creating open standards – therefore, we don’t need to participate in standards activities.” To which my reply is, “best of luck to you!”
The reality is that unless you are Google, or of a similar size and market share, you will have an extremely difficult time getting critical mass around your homegrown standard. And, typically a small open source project (they all start out small usually) has the exact problem of competing against larger competitors, like Google, who are much more likely to pull off that strategy than they are.
That may seem like an odd statement but it became apparent to me when discussing open source and student systems with an audience at a presentation of mine at the JA-SIG conference in 2006. What I mean is that at the end of the day, both open source and proprietary solutions are challenged to come up with the right designs in the education segment with respect to what is customizable and what is not.
Those that want open source solutions include in the key factors control and customization. However, if control and customization comes at the price of “forking” in the open source world, there is a big problem. You then lose the key benefit of the shared investment in upgrades, evolution, etc. that is so important. So, customization must be done judiciously and most importantly, designed into the core platform for forward and backward compatibility. This is exactly what seems to be the key challenge of many proprietary solutions in the education space. That is, is there enough customization afforded in the right ways so that the institution can differentiate itself, innovate, and so forth?
Wow! Maybe I finally wrote something controversial. Maybe this qualifies as a blog now! It is very sad to me, but also an opportunity for those that wish to lead, that “the technologies of learning” are not strategic in our education institutions. What I mean by “strategic” is that the executive leadership understands that investment in technology to support learning is a key priority – not just to further the educational mission of the institution but also to further society’s progress in the use of technology for learning.
I kind of wrote a whole article on this topic earlier this year for Educause Review. For the purposes of this discussion, I want to point out that the same seems to be true of open source learning applications. The only exception I know of (there may be others I have not yet been exposed to) is the Open University in the U.K. and their evolving adoption of Moodle.
Open U. sees participation in an open source community as a way to leverage investment and innovation. As such, Open U. has stepped up to a key leadership role in that community and sees this as an ongoing core investment. Again, the difference between this strategy and others I am aware of is that it is not an IT department strategy. It is an institutional strategy that goes hand in hand with the philosophy and strategy of Open U.
I realize that this sort of thing is not easy to pull off in higher education institutions, especially the elite institutions with many diverse and largely independent schools, divisions, departments, etc. And, as I already mentioned, this may be more of an issue with technologies for learning in general versus open source versions of that technology. It will be interesting to see if other institutions can follow suit and which ones will emerge as the leaders in learning technology, open source, or both. The relationship to standards should be obvious – institutional buy-in to learning technology standards will help move the market to the great benefits of standards adoption.
OK, so that’s about all I think I might have learned. I’m very interested in your reflections on the topic. We have been very active in transforming IMS Global Learning Consortium into a venue where these sort of bigger picture ideas are discussed, in order to help inform the global learning segment. You may find our annual report on trends in learning, technology, and standards of interest or might be interested in joining our online community.
Hello, First, I would like to offer a big thank you to Rob for his thought provoking post. I think that there are lot’s of practical hooks here and I would like to take advantage of them. I concur with Rob’s third postulate
Postulate number three: Whether open source or proprietary, it’s all about the boundaries of customization.
but I have some practical questions.
It is not uncommon for an institution that is considering the adoption of OSS to cite customization as a major factor in their decision making. In fact, one of the major themes that came out of this Series (Impact of OSS and OER on Education) was the benefits that could be derived from FLOSS through localization. Does anybody have anything to offer about how to take advantage of the potential to customize without “forking.” (examples would be great) Or, under what circumstances is it appropriate to fork a project?
What is the role of open standards?
Hi Rob, Ken and colleagues,
A great thought provoking post. Regarding the boundaries of customisation, this is typically defined by easily workable programming interfaces (ideally correlating to open standards), system architecture and constraints of licensing - licensing constraints can also include incompatibilities between open source licenses. When you have a large community based open source project the architecture is often highly modular - e.g. Drupal, Moodle. This enables more customisation, plus better backwards and forwards compatibility. So individual institutions can have quite different configurations without forking. Moodle is a classic case where this application is being used for home schooling and institutions with many 10s of thousands of users. However, as the core code matures and it inherently becomes more complex and the skills and investment barrier for customisation can increase.
For Postulate Four, I’d like to refer way back to my post back in March here on Terra Incognita
Actually I’m proud to say that our work here on enterprise scale implementations of Moodle, particularly at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, helped Open University in their selection of Moodle.
Strategic adoption of open source infrastructure is happening in New Zealand at a pan-institutional level and may even start to impact the paradigm of institutional learning as we view it in a traditional sense. Over the past year I’ve been leading an initiative that has developed what we call Moodle Networks - it is a trusted Single Sign-on framework where multiple Moodle installations can be networked with all sorts of configurations possible. We used XML-RPC rather than a full Shibboleth framework. I often describe it as an “Intel inside” strategy whereby the institutional “nodes” are the access points to the network rather than typical (and in my view flawed) portal approach to learning networks.
It doesn’t stop with Moodle. Mahara (www.mahara.org) is to be the ePortfolio and student social networking platform that will be deployed as http://www.myportfolio.ac.nz. This is a pan-institutional strategy that will bridge both further and higher education institutions. Similarly, open source repository systems where through the OARINZ project we are seeing wide-spread adoption of open source and OAI-PMH compliant repository systems deployed across the entire sector - DSpace, Fedora and Eprints are all being used.
All this is happening outside of any direct Ministry direction (although naturally consistent with the eFramework SOA direction) and so I would argue these are very much institutional strategies but even more importantly the national virtual learning environment is underpinned by open source and open standards. When working with Ken Udas back in 2004 we set up http://www.eduforge.org to help manage the various projects that make contribute to the overall framework. Being advocates of openness this was conceived as an open platform for anyone to use so it is heartening to see so many international projects there.
Anyway, I’m going on a bit here, excuse me ;-). Rob, perhaps I’ll see you at the IMS meeting in Queenstwon in November.
regards Richard Wyles
Hi Richard, Yes, I will see you in New Zealand . . . first time there and looking forward to it.
If you haven’t already, I hope you submit your work for a LIA Award:
http://www.imsglobal.org/learningimpact2008/li2008submissionregional.cfm
Best, Rob
The reality is that unless you are Google, or of a similar size and market share, you will have an extremely difficult time getting critical mass around your homegrown standard.
I would clarify that statement: if it competes with an existing standard. If you make a standard where there isn’t one, if it’s good, it may get adopted — see, e.g., RSS.
Re: postulate 4, I feel like using FOSS should be strategic to the mission of the university in several ways. It would be helpful to articulate this well — to have a document that says, “This is why you should support this”. (That’s what I tried to do in my post on open access, for OER advocates.)
Who’s articulated that message well? If it hasn’t been done well yet, what would that message say? How does FOSS connect to the mission of the academy?
Hi Gavin, Thanks for the post. I would agree that something doesn’t have to be a standard or worked through a standards organization to get critical mass of adoption. Many approved standards - in fact the majority of them - never get a critical mass of adoption. So, the point I would make is that it’s a question of where you can get the right parties involved so they will adopt it. This is probably more important than if there is an existing standard already or not. A Google has such a huge market share and so many partners that follow their lead that they can create a snowball of adoption. This is why a large market-share leader generally needs to be convinced as to why they should spend time in standards organizations when they can dictate the actions of a large portion of the market.
My point relates to the educational open source efforts to date in that they have relatively small market influence and benefit greatly in a standards organization if it has enough participants to create that snowball effect.
I wasn’t familiar with the history of RSS - I found this site - can’t vouch for its accuracy: http://www.rss-specifications.com/history-rss.htm
The way I read the history is that Netscape had a major role in RSS in the 1997 and 1999 era. Although Netscape dropped it, they were a very big dog in that time period and their efforts on it certainly signaled that it could be important to the market.
So, in a way, you are right that it certainly made its way without Google or a standards organization. On the other hand, it supports my argument as well in that there probably was fairly rapid adoption by the major browsers because they had been looking into this already and needed a solution.
Thanks again - you made a great point there . . . Best, Rob
Hello, Does anybody have any thoughts on the relationship between open standards and open source? I recognize that this is an overly broad question and could be taken in a number of directions, but I am thinking along the lines of what this means practically to folks who make technology adoption, support, and use decisions at schools colleges, and universities. For example:
Could somebody take a minute and outline some of the benefits of open standards and how they might practically impact educational institutions?
What are some of the practical challenges of establishing open standards?
Are there qualitative differences between OSS and proprietary methods of production, licensing, code transparency, community, etc. that impact adoption of open standards and participation in standards development?
I guess that this is about strategic adoption of learning support, design, delivery, and presentation technologies. We all want to meet current functional needs, but recognize that we also need to shield ourselves from some of the risk of pursuing a technology cul de sac without a viable exit or migration strategy.
Has taken a while to digest the content of this entry, now having done so I would like to refer back to my comment Gavin Bakers entry ‘Open Access Journal Literature is an Open Educational Resource’ of 2007-09-05 (comment #3)
I agree with the points of the Four Postulates and they have become yet more fodder for the ongoing discussions as we advance our learning network out the Camp and on to the streets. I remain confident that at the end of the day Open Access will become a ‘Habit’ and universally accepted for. To use a analogy recently made about our own situation - ‘You hatched this dragon and now that it has learned to fly, have fun trying the get it back. . .’ Open Access will grow with the cooperation of the status quo, or it will replace and become the status quo and the sooner people embrace the idea the better it will become. I realize I am speaking to the converted, but we are a unique aberration, rapidly becoming a force and it is incumbent on us all to get people to listen.
‘Control+Ault+Delete’ is no longer the status quo. I love the quote of Tom Perkins in Wired Magazine 15.07 http://www.wired.com/culture/design/magazine/15-07/ff_boat
‘No way Bill Gates is controlling my boat, – I don’t ever want to have to press Control-Alt-Delete to restart, to make my boat go.’
I suggest that this applies to more than Bill.
Hello. I would like to refer for a moment to Rob’s second postulate:
Postulate number two: Standards organizations are pretty much the only way to get a level playing field when it comes to new open source applications for learning – however, that won’t happen unless the open source projects/communities are active participants.
I very much also hear in Rob’s message that Open Standards require participation and activate involvement. I also understand that to achieve that type of participation, the standard development process must also be open.
How does IMS facilitate this? That is, what types of commitments does IMS have, and processes does IMS use to help keep the development of open standards open (and participatory)?
Thanks
Hi Ken, Great question. Excuse the brevity in t