Open Source LMS
Wake-Up Call: Open Source LMS
By Sam S. Adkins
Are Open Source LMS platforms taking the lead in learning technology innovation?
“Some
would say we should be fiercely competitive with Open Source, but our
point of view is there’s a tremendous opportunity for co-existence
between commercial and Open Source software to deliver the best
solutions to the e-learning market.”
Chris Vento, chief technology officer, WebCT, June 2005
There
is a growing market demand for Open Source learning management system
(OS LMS) products. This demand has attracted the attention of many
corporate and government clients. Clients have begun to ask if Open
Source LMSs are now viable alternatives to commercial platforms.
Essentially, they are asking, “Are OS LMS platforms as good as
commercial products yet?”
The
answer to date has been tentative and conditional. I answer that Open
Source LMS platforms will be competitive when two market conditions
occur: The market for commercial platforms reaches the commodity stage
and OS LMS products exceed the level of innovation of the commercial
systems.
In my analysis of the commercial LMS market in the United States,
I have concluded that we are well into the commodity phase in the
market for LMS products. Commoditization (for any product) occurs when
demand is very high, there are a firmly entrenched vendors supplying
high-quality products, and competing products lack significant
differentiation in the perception of customers. Customers expect high
quality but shop for price. It may seem counterintuitive, but in a
commodity market, products become more advanced while prices drop.
For example, the new Dell Learning System (DLS) LMS product costs less than $25,000 for an unlimited number of users.
There is no per-user license fee. The key innovation of this LMS
product is not the low flat price but rather the fact that Dell ships
it pre-installed on a storage server, sometimes called a network
appliance. Installation is as simple as plugging it in. The Dell DLS
even includes a full library of pre-installed e-learning content, which
makes it even more attractive to buyers.
In
order for OS LMS products to compete in this commodity market they have
to continually meet and exceed the innovation in commercial products.
But in a commodity market customers will rarely switch brands or
substitute products unless there is a clear perception of higher value.
This is known as “the threat of substitution” in
Porter’s Five Factors Model. Essentially, rival vendors arrive on
the market with products that can replace the dominant products.
The rivals have arrived
There
are currently dozens of OS learning technology products on the market,
and the list is growing. Moodle, Ganesha, Claroline, ILIAS, and Sakai appear to be the dominant OS LMS products so far, at least in terms of adoption size and market buzz.
Version
1.0 of Moodle was released in August 2002, but has rapidly evolved
through several versions due to the large community of developers
working on it. Moodle now boasts a community of over 6112 sites and
50,000 users across 126 countries. Moodle is not the only OS LMS
gaining traction in the market, though. Ganesha, created in France
by the commercial e-learning company Anemalab, claims to have more than
4,000 sites. Claroline is used by some 470 organizations in 65
countries, and ILIAS dominates the German university market.
Sakai
is the new kid on the block, launching in January 2004 with a $2.4
million grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The Sakai Project is a
joint effort of several organizations, including the University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, and Stanford. These four organizations alone are investing an additional $4 million in the development of the product.
The
demand for OS LMS products has attracted the attention of the major
enterprise software vendors. In April 2005, IBM announced that it had
joined the Sakai Project. In June 2005, Sun and Unisys joined Sakai.
It
seems clear that the OS LMS trend will not be contained to the higher
education market for long. Higher education institutions have begun to
deploy OS LMS products on a very large scale. For example, in April
2005, the Open Polytechnic in New Zealand announced a $1 million (New Zealand
dollars) project to deploy Moodle across 20 higher education
institutions and 10 secondary schools. In June 2005, the Universidad
Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Spain
announced it had deployed the .LRN platform (pronounced
“dotLRN”) to manage the courseware for their 200,000
globally distributed distance learning students.
Where there’s demand, there’s innovation
Clearly,
there is customer demand and market momentum for OS LMS products, and a
great deal of research and development is focusing on these products.
But Chris Vento points out, this R&D pales in comparison to the
millions of dollars being invested in the commercial systems. Yet,
commercial vendors do not share their innovations. Indeed, their
inventions are what define their competitive value in terms of
intellectual property. The commercial vendors compete in innovation.
The
reverse is true in OS LMS research and development. According to Chris
Coppola, chief information officer at rSmart, “The spirit of Open
Source is formed around diversity of input, recombination of ideas,
creativity, and collaboration. These are essential ingredients for
innovation and clear advantages to the Open Source philosophy.”
So while a great deal less money is being poured into OS LMS
development, a vast number of developers are contributing to the
innovation process.
Many
ask when will OS LMS products be competitive? Perhaps the answer is
once they exceed the level of innovation of their commercial
counterpoints. This leads to more questions: Why exceed and not just
match? Why are OS LMS products held to a higher bar? This is due to the
customer perception of value and the economic concept known as
substitution mentioned above. Customers will switch if they perceive a
higher degree of value. In a commodity market, value is a matter of
innovation.
Are Open Source LMS platforms taking the lead in learning technology innovation?
To
ascertain the level of innovation in OS LMS products, I enlisted the
aid of five professionals that have experience with both commercial and
OS products: Richard Brincefield, Patrick F. Carey, David Grebow, Mara Hancock, and Chris
Vento. I asked them to answer one question, “Are Open Source LMS
platforms taking the lead in learning technology innovation?”
Richard Brincefield, CEO of GlobalLiteracy Inc.
My answer to that question is yes. Compare Moodle with Blackboard, WebCT, Intralearn, Jones International University,
etc. Moodle has the majority of features the big proprietary LMSs have.
For comparison information about both proprietary and Open Source LMSs
go to EduTools site. In their comparison of 42 LMS features and
capabilities, Moodle had all but eight.
In 1997, while working at the University of Phoenix,
I researched what was available for LMSs at that time and installed
working versions of IBTauthor and TopClass. IBTauthor later became
Docent and is now merged with the SumTotal product. SumTotal is the
result of combining Click2Learn and Docent. TopClass is from WBT
Systems. Both IBTauthor/Docent and TopClass were (and are) good
products. I chose Docent. I installed and supported Docent for the University of Phoenix from 1997 to February 2003.
In
1998, a small company purchased Docent for close to $10,000 and asked
me to host and support it. I installed it on one of my servers that was
hosted at a local ISP. It worked great. The problem was that upgrades
became more expensive than the original cost which meant that Docent
was priced too high for small companies. I had to come up with a
solution or the small company would cease to exist and I would have
lost a very good paying customer.
In
January 2000, I started developing my own LMS called TraineeTracker
that my customer could use as a low-cost alternative. TraineeTracker
replaced Docent for my customer by the end of 2000. It was developed in
ColdFusion, and all customers received a copy of the source code
(insurance for the customer in case my company went out of business).
It satisfied the needs of the customers and is still in use. In 2002, I
started following closely two new Open Source LMSs: Moodle and ILIAS.
In 2003, I chose Moodle as the LMS I was going to master and promote.
My
own proprietary LMS (TraineeTracker) had about 25 percent of the
capability of Moodle. The cost of Moodle is free. You pay for hosting,
support, training, and customization. Hosting for Moodle starts at $10
a month using an ISP. It’s easy to install on both Windows and
Linux servers. It can be installed on laptops for presentations where
Internet access is not available.
I
have no arguments against large corporations purchasing expensive
proprietary solutions, such as Docent (which I love), but small
companies, small schools, and small religious institutions are left out
because they cannot afford Docent-like solutions. To me, Moodle gives
the same power for a small company, school, etc. that the expensive
solutions provide. I love the power the Internet and Open Source
provides for the individual and small companies.
Patrick F. Carey, leader, Americas Higher Education Industry, IBM Business Consulting Services
The
answer is yes. I believe that the answer to the innovation question is
clear, and addressed more by the fact that projects like Sakai
and OSPI are developed by a “community” than the fact that it’s
Open Source. To me, it’s the difference between serial and
parallel processing.
I like to describe Sakai
as more of an ecosystem than an application. An application is
monolithic, both in development and innovation, whereas an ecosystem is
more like a community, with permeable membranes and a common language
(standards) that many people with diverse experiences and ideas share,
collaboration happens and then…more innovation.
I believe that the CMS to LMS maturation is now being followed by a further maturity into what is called CLE
or collaborative learning environment(s). I also believe that community
Open Source, that is standards-based, enables much faster innovation
due to its community development—more good minds innovating. In
addition, the fact that in order to be successful, community
development has to be standards-based, again eliminating the barriers
to innovation common with proprietary development that is focused on
driving a license-revenue model.
If
we can get the emerging community source CLEs and the publishers to
agree on a single content standard, and there are conversations going
on about this, the commercial LMSs will need to “wake up” as you put
it. Education and learning will be much better off as energy will be
focused on the content and innovation rather than a proprietary
environment.”
David Grebow, Chief Learning Officer of Comcourse
I’m
not trying to straddle the answer; I really think its Yes and No. Yes,
Open Source LMS platforms are taking the innovative lead. No,
they’re not in the lead as products because there’s more to
‘taking the innovative lead’ than just innovation.
From
where I sit, with one foot in the Academic world and the other in the
Corporate, the Open Source coders are leaping ahead of the proprietary
LMS vendors in terms of innovation. But there’s more to taking
the lead than simply piling on innovative features and functions.
Using Claroline in Europe and Moodle in the United States,
two programs currently leading the LMS Open Source charge, I
consistently hear three major issues that Open Source needs to overcome
in order to really take the lead and beat their proprietary competitors.
First
issue: a case of really bad GUI. Too many Open Source LMS programs are
just too hard to use. From talking with Open Source developers, the
reason seems to be that the real work is in the coding, and the rest is
not important (sound familiar?). In the proprietary world, GUI is
everything. If the user cannot easily and quickly learn how to navigate
around the system, then they will quit faster than you can press the
‘Esc’ key. Proprietary systems literally live and die by
being part of a user feedback loop. If the GUI gets in the way and
disables the learning process, then it’s toast. Open Source
developers, it seems, cannot see beyond their code.
Second
issue: documentation is usually spotty, and formal training programs
are no better. Open Source LMS projects tend to have a major problem
with providing decent documentation—if you can find it in the
first place. Because there’s no contract that requires
documentation, it’s usually some general guidelines, almost a
FAQ, instead of a carefully written complete manual. And, they’re
written by programmers for programmers. The most common response to
complaints about documentation is “If they can’t understand it,
they’re not ready to install it.” Documentation should
always be written for the user with the assumption that they are simply
trying to learn how to use a program, not add more cool code.
Third
issue: Open Source is plagued by the very thing that makes it great.
Creative programming, from many different programmers, drives the small
parts of code that can add up to the great features and functions of an
Open Source LMS. That same LMS also suffers from an almost endless
feature creep, and this time not at the request of the Customer. They
go way over the top because programmers can program all the innovative
features and functions they can imagine. And as we all know,
imagination is endless and boundless. It ends up so cool that the
average user does not know where to start.
Unlike
most proprietary LMS programs that are usually driven by a small and
knowledgeable team, responding to the requirements of customers
gathered from a variety of sources, Open Source LMS suffers from the
“too many cooks” syndrome.
Again,
it gets back to the successful innovative product mantra: It’s
not what the LMS program can do (i.e., how innovative it is), but what
it can do for you.
Mara Hancock associate director, Educational Technology Services at University of California, Berkeley
I
think we are on the verge of that revolution. I believe that there has
always been more innovation in learning technology that’s coming
directly from higher education than from the large commercial vendors,
but in the past there wasn’t a clear path for sharing those tools and
innovations and often the lack of an integrated platform was a show
stopper.
Open Source platforms, such as Sakai
and Moodle, allow for the integration of these innovative tools and
help to alleviate the overall ease-of-use barriers for the end users
and support costs for the institution.
In addition to the technology benefits, the Sakai Project brings with it an active and organized community (thus the term, community source)
that shares in the vision, governance, and hopefully, the development.
This creates a strong ecosystem that promises to foster and generate
major innovation in the collaboration and learning environments. The
upcoming Sakai Winter Conference promises to be an excellent showcase
for this.
Chris Vento, chief technology officer at WebCT
Not sure that leadership or either-or
is really the current reality or significance of the Open Source
potential. Bear in mind that the major commercial educational
technology companies continue to pour millions of dollars each year
into R&D at multiples much larger than any current Open Source
funded initiative.
Those
expenditures and resources are focused on innovation to satisfy
customer requirements and demand for features as their e-learning
environments continue to expand and touch larger numbers of students,
instructors, administrators, and classroom environments each year.
Not
to mention, there is the added competitive dimension amongst the
commercial vendor landscape to drive innovation so as to attract higher
volume usage of their respective products via a continuous stream of
new features and functionality.
However,
this is not all about the commercial vendor landscape monopolizing
innovation. As is the reality within other market segments of the
broader software industry, the Open Source community is an invaluable
additional source of innovation that can coexist with and compliment
commercial vendor products and solutions.
The
Open Source community has a definitive role, and in some cases
advantage, in focusing their initiatives on learning applications and
tools that can extend and compliment the commercial learning platform
environment without having to continue to pressure and rely on
commercial vendors to supply those product extensions. Many of the
commercial platforms already facilitate, and will further enhance, such
capabilities to integrate a wide variety of both commercial and Open
Source technology extensions.
So,
it isn’t about who is leading who in innovation. It’s about
how such innovation from both the commercial and open community sources
can coexist, leveraging their respective expertise and experiences, to
synergistically provide the absolute best and most comprehensive set of
functionality to enhance the overall e-learning environment required to
advance the quality, of education for students, faculty and
administrators.
Epilogue: innovation in progress
At the Always On 2004 Innovation Summit at Stanford University
in July 2004, Marten Mickos, CEO of the Open Source database product
MySQL, said that “My bottom line is that to commoditize something
takes enormous innovation, skill, competition, and technical ability.
It’s not easily done.”
Tim
Gnatek, in an August 2005 article entitled “Open Source for
All” wrote that, “Open Source software is great in concept,
and there are a few notable programs that closely rival their
commercial counterparts. The great majority, however, are works in
progress.”
Indeed,
OS LMS products are works in progress and show great promise. Chris
Coppola from rSmart believes that, “Open Source innovation
represents the leading edge of a revolution that will literally change
the landscape of technology in education for years to come.”
In
a commoditized LMS market dominated by high-quality commercial products
and very firmly entrenched vendors, OS LMS products will have to reach
a level of innovation high enough to convince customers to switch from
the dominant products. They can’t be merely good enough, they
have to be better. They must take the lead in innovation.
