Open Source and Open Standards in Higher Education
Anand Kumar Chauhan*
Abstract
The newest trend in software
development is open source, which has become almost a revolution over the last
decade. Led by the finest software minds
on the planet, open source is not only a social and collaborative way to
develop software, but in most cases is immune to the profit motive common in
the close source software company culture.
Open source software gave rise to open standards of data exchange,
control procedures, and interaction among open source software components. This paper will analyze contributions made by
open source software to education in general with special reference to higher
education. The paper ends with a
description and comparison of key features of some open source/open standard
resources for e-learning. These
demonstrate the flexibility and consequent cost reduction for online education
systems.
Introduction
For fifty years, software
development has been in the hands of commercial companies. During the 1990s, however, this has
changed. The Open Source Initiative (OSI[1]) defines
the standards which must be followed for any software to be designated open
source. OSI definitions have led to
four aspects of open source software which render it well suited to educational
purposes. These will be discussed in the
following section.
Superiority
Open source software is based
on free distribution of the source codes which form the core of any software
system. Since these codes can be freely
downloaded and modified, the skills of thousands of individual human intellects
can be focused on a given software project.
Thus, the length of the software development cycle is much reduced. In addition, software products are more
thoroughly tested because users all over the world are available to test the
results. In closed source software, only
a handful of engineers (rather than end use consumers) do the testing and bugs
creep in. This can easily be seen by
comparing the two most common PC operating systems in use today: Linux,
representing open source and Windows, a close source commercial product.
Also, open source software
develops in a natural way since decisions about software design and coding are
made by the entire open course community rather than by only a few project
leaders or lead programmers. In open
source development, only the best and most powerful solutions and methodologies
survive the test of time and the scrutiny of the whole community. Thus, the process of development ensures that
the best approach and the best pieces of software code become part of the final
product.
Open Source as an Ideal Choice
In college level computer
science courses like Operating Systems or Computer Networks, class concepts are
always supplemented by laboratory assignments or projects. In such a scenario, open course is the ideal
choice because the students can modify and experiment with the source
codes. The students also have the
opportunity to inspect the inner workings of a real time software product. This is not possible in the case of
commercial software. It is not
surprising, therefore, that Linux is the most popular operating system for
academic and research purposes, and real time deployment at universities world
wide.
Open Standards[2]
A software product usually
consists of various modules, each having a different function. The collective behavior of these components
defines the overall functionality of the product itself since each component
depends on and exchanges data with the others.
Open source software development is done all over the world and each
part of the community develops individual modules. Thus, it became necessary to establish
standards and common definitions for open source software. These standards are defined as the description
of data exchange and functional protocol to define interaction between modules
to insure interoperability of software.
Software components which follow specific open standards can be replaced
with other standard-compliant products.
Thus, the user is given more freedom to choose the component best suited
to his needs and is not bound to a particular product, as with commercial
software.
IEEE LTSC[3]
(Learning Technology Standards Committee) is working to define a range of
standards for online education. JA-SIG [4](Java
Architectures Special Interest Group) has already established uPortal as one
standard for online content management.
This is the fastest emerging standard and has even been implemented by
commercial close source vendors such as WebCT and SCT Web. MIT’s OKI[5]
(Open Knowledge Initiative) is collaboration between universities and
standardization organizations to support learning in higher education. OKI provides an extensible
architecture which defines the interaction between different components of
educational software. WebCT and
Blackboard are two of the close source commercial products which are OKI
compliant. IMS[6]
Global Learning Consortium is a world wide group of educational, commercial,
and governmental organizations which collaborate to develop e-learning
standards.
Open Source Software
There is a great deal of
freely-downloadable open source software.
In some cases, the entire system can be built cost free using an open
source operating system, web server, and database. It should be noted, however,
that some open source software requires prerequisites which are not free or
open source. Some of the major features
of open source educational content management software which can be used to
make an online educational system are compared in the table[7]
below.
|
Product |
OS |
Technology |
Web server |
Database |
Compliance |
|
ATutor 1.3 |
Unix/Win |
PHP |
IIS/Apache |
MySQL |
IMS |
|
Bazaar 7.04 |
Unix |
CGI Perl |
Apache |
MySQL |
IMS, IEEE |
|
Bodington 2.1.0 |
Unix/Win |
Java |
Tomcat / iPlanet |
MySQL/ Oracle/ PostgreSQL |
IMS |
|
CHEF 1.0.7 |
Unix/Win |
Java |
Tomcat |
|
|
|
Caroline 1.4 |
Unix/Win |
PHP |
Apache |
MySQL |
|
|
Courseware 2.5 |
Unix/Win |
Java |
Tomcat |
Oracle/ PostgreSQL |
OKI |
|
Eledge 3.1 |
Unix/Win |
Java |
Apache/ Tomcat |
MySQL |
|
|
FILE3 1.4.2 |
Unix/Win |
Python |
ZOPE |
|
|
|
Jones e- education V2003 |
Unix |
Java |
Apache/ Tomcat |
MySQL |
IMS |
|
KEWL 1.2 |
Win |
ASP |
IIS |
SQL Server |
|
|
LON-CAPA 1.0 |
Unix |
|
|
MySQL |
|
|
|
Unix |
CGI C |
Apache |
|
|
|
Mimerdesk 1.5.3.1 |
Unix |
CGI Perl |
Apache |
MySQL/ PostgreSQL |
|
|
moodle 1.1.1 |
Unix/Win |
PHP |
Apache/IIS |
MySQL/ PostgreSQL |
|
|
Whiteboard 1.0.2 |
Unix |
PHP |
|
MySQL |
|
Conclusion
Open source software is
clearly an important component of modern higher education and will show a
promising growth rate in higher education for the next decade. However, it will take some period of time for
this new field to reach its full potential, in part because it appears that few
standards have been widely adopted in the production of educational
software. Educational institutes and
policy makers must take the responsibility for implementing free standards and
encouraging the development of open source software. Also, in my view, truly open source software
should not require the use of any commercial components. Open source software should be truly “open.” And on a personal note, my favorite software
in the list above is Moodle which I have been modifying and testing for real
time deployment.
* Anand Kumar
Chauhan, Instructor of Computer Science, Lamar
Email is Andy.Chauhan@lamarpa.edu