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ALI JAFARI'S POINT OF VIEW
Ali Jafari,
tenured professor in the Department of Computer
and Information Technology at the Purdue School
of Engineering and Technology at Indiana
University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
and director and founder of CyberLab at IUPUI (http://cyberlab.iupui.edu),
is an expert on course management system
technology. In his role at CyberLab, Jafari was
the head architect and developer of two CMS
systems - Angel, which is now a commercial
learning management system sold by Angel
Learning (www.angellearning.com)
that is being used by Pennsylvania State
University, Seattle University, University of
Mississippi, and others - and Oncourse, which
currently serves all eight campuses of Indiana
University
(https://oncourse.iu.edu).
Jafari is also
co-author, with Patricia McGee and Colleen
Carmean, of "Course Management Systems for
Learning: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy," scheduled
to be published by Information Science
Publishing by the end of this month. He is also
currently on sabbatical, conducting research as
the principal investigator for a project titled
"Research on Next Generation Course Management
Systems."
In a recent
interview conducted by Educational Pathways
Editor and Publisher George Lorenzo, Jafari
suggested that there were three challenges that
an open source CMS must tackle in order to
succeed. He mentioned that "open source today
has a small market share, but there is a good
percentage of higher education technology
administrators who are optimistic about the
future of an open source CMS, and I do see their
points. Their IT budgets are very sad,
especially when they have to pay for the
increasing licensing fees of the commercial CMS
systems, something that they did not budget for.
Additionally, they are not happy with the ease
of use and reliability of the current commercial
systems." Jafari said that if an open source CMS
product can be developed that is capable,
reliable and cost efficient (as outlined below),
"they’ll take it."
I. It must be as good as or better than the
current successful commercial CMS systems.
"If you
want to compete (with the major commercial CMS
products) you have to make it better or the same
in terms of all the futuristic aspects of it,
and this is not an easy challenge. I am using a
popular open-source CMS system now, and I know
it is a couple of versions behind the commercial
versions. I say this because I cannot imagine a
provost or dean saying to their faculty that
they have an idea to save $50,000 or $100,000 by
switching to open source if that is less
sophisticated. They want better learning
outcomes from students and easier and less
time-consuming CMS tools for instructors to
teach distance-learning courses. Increasing
learning outcomes and saving faculty time using
a CMS requires a sophisticated system with
powerful and intelligent communication and
collaboration tools."
II. It must be reliable.
"In
general, the more open the system is, the less
reliable the system becomes. Imagine if you let
your teenage boy modify your automobile engine
to make it go faster or run smoother. The
likelihood of your car breaking in the middle of
the road becomes higher. When you take it to
your car dealer, it may take the dealer a longer
time to figure out what has caused the problem
than if it were a car with the original
manufacturer’s settings. I assume many message
boards, online testing tools, and chat software
within a CMS, for example, will be less reliable
if the university software folks began making
changes in their codes. Once a local programmer
adds news lines of code into an open source, it
may introduce bugs and cause the system to halt
or crash. The more sophisticated the system, the
more difficult to trouble shoot it, and the next
generation of CMS will be very sophisticated."
III. Cost
"Schools
are paying a good salary to those IT folks who
are adjusting open source codes and making
changes. So, there are many indirect costs
associated with open source that will soon
surface. If you want to go with the notion of an
open source, you are going to have to have a
developer maintaining it that might cost more
than the licensing (of a commercial CMS)." |
