Open Solutions for Education

In the time since I left IBM, I have joined and invested in a small startup called Open Solutions for Education or OS4ED. ( http://os4ed.com) The mission of our little philanthropic venture is to produce quality open source alternatives to costly K-12 administrative software. The business model is like most open source models: Give it away for free and make your living from fees for maintenance services, training, customizations, etc.

Yesterday we released our new SIS, openCentre, and opened the demo site. I encourage you all to visit and try it out. The demo is located at http://demo.os4ed.com. You can log in using these credentials:

Administrator - User Name = admin, password=admin
Teacher - User Name=teacher, password=teacher
Parent - User Name=parent, password=parent

We also have an alpha version data warehouse and are set to release an add-on module for critical communications called EasyCom. We are excited about our efforts and hope you find our SW fits your needs. Enjoy!

Linux on the Desktop

I recently left IBM having been an education consultant for 7 years. During this time, I decided t make the full commitment to using Linux as a desktop. The Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04 release has gotten generally good reviews for its ease of use, so I decided to give it a try.

My HW setup is a standard IBM Thinkpad T40 laptop that was a used purchase. It has the following specs:

• 80 GB HD (Western Digital)
• 1 GB RAM
• Intel Wireless Ethernet Adapter
• Broadcom Ethernet Adapter
• all of the other standard stuff like modem, USB, etc.

I downloaded Feisty Fawn and created a bootable disk using CD Burner XP, a free and really nice CD burning SW application. If you use this application, please donate some money to keep their effort going. This is a great example of the reasons why free SW works.

Onto the installation. I inserted the disk into my CD/DVD drive, connected an Ethernet cable and booted my laptop. I was offered some choices and after choosing the installation option, everything started as promised. Approximately 20-30 minutes later, I had a running installation of Ubuntu with the basic set of tools that I needed to accomplish my daily activities.

Nearly 30 days later, my laptop has never crashed and I have gotten the hang of getting apps or plug-ins using the command line options. All in all, I am quite pleased and am still only using this Linux based laptop for my everyday needs.

Free and Open Source Software

In my last post: It's Not About Free Software, It's About Control and TCO, I made an argument that a model based on software given away for free with all of its source code was not a sustainable model. In the post, I used the term FOSS and defined it incorrectly. My thanks to gnuosphere for pointing this out in a civil manner befitting an education discussion. Gnuosphere also provided this link to the GNU definition of FOSS.

So going back to the original post and altering the definition of FOSS, I think that the model of simply giving away open source software for free is not sustainable, particularly in situations where frequent and disparate updates are required, a situation very common in education. The post was simply a statement that the real benefits are the open nature, the control that exists because of that openness and the lower total cost of ownership that can return real dollars to the instructional budgets of schools.

Watch this video as an example of an Italian organization of schools that replaced Windows and M$FT Office with Linux and OpenOffice to realize a lower TCO with free OSS and lower maintenance fees. Sounds a lot like the model I proposed.

It's Not About Free Software, It's About Control and TCO

Often times when discussing open source software, you hear the term FOSS, which stands for Free Open Source Software. To me personally, FOSS is very idealistic and somewhat unrealistic. In case most people have forgotten, we live in a capitalistic society that rewards those who create wealth. Ultimately, we must provide necessities for ourselves such as food, clothing and shelter. Writing free software and then giving it away does not lend itself to a supportable model. Even considering the power of community and collaboration, it is likely that those two factors are not enough to sustain a long term model producing FOSS.

So where does that leave us? Paying customers of course that enable a philanthropic software model to exist over time with sustainable results. That is not a bad thing and the reality is that is the way successful open source software works now. In my lowly opinion, OSS is really about control and total cost of ownership, not free software. Let's look at these two items separately.

We will start with TCO because it is very easy. For the record, I will say that M$FT produces very good products and for those education organizations interested in an integrated environment, M$SFT fits the bill for them. The caveat is that M$FT is in business to sell software licenses and over time, a M$FT district will be forced to upgrade products and pay additional costs for those upgrades. Often times, this means a requisite hardware upgrade as well. Anybody say Vista? This can become very costly and in large districts the sums of money spent can be staggering. Take Broward County Schools that two years ago tried to get approval to spend $68M on Apple Computers. That is a chunk of change to say the least.

Or take the FLDOE's Sunshine Connection project where M$FT gave them the software for free and some services to implement as well. I think that the total value could be around $20 million supposedly. Did M$FT really give away $20M or did they secure a long term annuity stream of revenue? I recently read in a white paper somewhere that Sharepoint 2007 has certain functionalities that require Office 2007. In other words, to enjoy the full potential of Sharepoint 2007 you must acquire Office 2007. So let's do some simple math. I am going to assume that the state of Florida's education system has about 1 million computers. Let's say at some point in time, that the FL DOE forces everyone to do at least one thing in Sunshine Connections that requires Office 2007. Assuming a per desktop license fee of $25 for Office 2007, that comes out to $25 million and it seems that over the long haul, M$FT is really giving Sunshine Connections away for only $5 million. And as the years go by and more upgrades are required and profits rise, you begin to realize that M$FT simply made an investment in FL to drive an incredible revenue stream over time.

OSS presents a situation where schools and districts can begin to take control and manage TCO to their benefit. Let's consider Linux as a start and specifically, let's look at thin client technology. For our example, we are going to consider Brandon Elementary School in Atlanta, GA. Brandon had approximately 1-2 computers per classroom running Windows XP and was experiencing a myriad of problems with those computers. Because it was an elementary school, Brandon did not have the proper technical resources and depended upon two parents for maintenance of their computers. These poor souls were spending a great deal of their time fixing these computers and decided to look for an alternative. They found K12LTSP and decided to give it a try. Using equipment donated from local businesses, they built an environment of 35 K12LTSP servers that are now managing approximately 250 Linux thin clients. They have raised the average number of computers in the classroom from 2 to 6 and have 8 or 9 in some classrooms. The uptime has been amazing and they are using thin clients running on 350MHz processors. Businesses are throwing away computers with that kind of processing power and would willingly give them away to schools. You can read the entire article here. Bottom line, Brandon estimates that they have saved about 90% costs per computer. That is a lot of money. Here is the direct quote from the article:

"Having Linux on the desktop has been a shot in the arm for the school in many ways. Howard and Fragakis estimate that installing used hardware with a cost-free operating system saved Brandon Elementary 90% of what it would have cost to install Windows XP PCs, and that doesn't include savings on operational and support costs. But the biggest benefit can't be counted in dollars."

As the years go on and they don't spend money on new hardware or new software, the cost savings begin to skyrocket and you can see that the TCO picture gets prettier over time. A side benefit: Brandon's test scores have risen and were the highest in the district and third in the State of Georgia.

What about control? Let's look at student information systems and small school districts. For this case, we will examine PowerSchool. PowerSchool is a SIS that was developed by Apple and later sold to Pearson. Pearson owns many SIS offerings and currently has greater than 50% market share for this particular application. In the small school districts, it is the dominant player by far. How much does PowerSchool cost? Here is a recent offer: http://www.pearsonschoolsystems.com/email/files/PremierBundle030708.htm

For the low one time licensing fee of $28 per student, you can acquire PowerSchool for your district of 1,000 - 3,000 students. These fees include implementation services, which I am guessing is installing the software and making sure it is working correctly. I can pretty accurately guess that fee does include services like data conversion from your old SIS. You can have those services performed for you at what appears to be a fee of $225 based on the Apple price list for Arkansas from 2005. So I have 3,000 kids, which means I pay $84,000 to acquire the software, have it installed and make sure it is running correctly. Should I require any additional services for something like data conversion, that costs and additional $225 an hour plus travel. For our case, let's assume that we will need one resource for one month (160 hours) to successfully convert all of our data, validate that it is correct and turn off the old SIS, That now adds another $44,000 assuming $2,000 per week travel costs. Now I am up to $128,000 total so far. At the end of year 1, I have to pay maintenance. For our example, we are going to assume that our district has purchased the Premier bundle, which includes a SIF agent for PowerSchool. According to the AK price list, maintenance comes to about $8 per student adding another $24,000. I am also going to assume that the three days of included training is not enough and add one more week. According to the AK price list, that will cost me $1,595 per day X 5 days = $7,975. My grand total is now $159,975.

What if I went with an open source SIS? There are multiple efforts underway. Centre, SchoolTool and OpenAdmin are examples. Of all the ones out there, I would guess that Centre is the most mature and has the most traction. Since it is open source, I immediately eliminate my one time licensing fee of $84,000. Let's assume that maintenance and support are equal. I checked Centre and they sell state reporting modules for $2,500. I don't know what they charge for data conversion of customization services, but am going to assume a flat rate of $100 plus travel. Using our earlier metric of 160 hours that adds $24,000 to the total. For training, I will assume the same $100 X 8 hours per day X 5 days = $4,000. Our grand total now comes to $54,500 representing a cost savings of $105,475 or 66%.

Over time, I would invest some of that savings into training resources in the open source technologies so that I could make my own changes to the source code. I don't get PowerSchool's source code. As an example, my state changes its reporting requirements and I have to add a field of change a field. I can have my resources do that instead of paying Pearson $225 an hour to make those changes. Over time, since I have access to the source code and because I have invested in my resources making them proficient in these technologies, I might choose to give up maintenance and support further saving myself $24,000 a year. And because I don't use M$FT products, I am not forced to upgrade my operating system and hardware saving large amounts of money.

While I think OSS has a ways to go, a 66% savings argument is very compelling for a small school district with very limited funds. While I talked about specifically about thin clients and SIS, there are a multitude of products out there that can run much a school district's major functions. In addition to the SIS, there is:

• Moodle for Learning Management and On-line Courses
• OpenBiblio to manage your library
• A variety of open source portals to manage your web site (Joomla, DotNet Nuke, Websphere Community Edition from IBM)
• Mambo for content management
• OpenOffice or StarOffice
• Edubuntu

The list could go on for quite some time, but you get the idea. Are you ready for lower TCO and better control of your IT environment? Time to investigate OSS.

Open Solutions in Education? - Let's Do the Math!

I recently was told by a friend that works at a district that they have been looking at options to replace their homegrown SIS. They are a small district and so PowerSchool was a natural choice. Pearson, the new owners of PowerSchool, quoted them $28 per student just for the software and data templates. That didn't include any help converting their existing data, modifying business processes or working on change management. In fact, Pearson quoted $225 per hour to perform these types of services. I am not sure about your small district, but my friend's district could hardly afford to pay a vendor $225 an hour plus travel expenses.

It occurs to me, that districts, especially smaller ones, should be considering the many open source options that are out there today and being used. Do you need a student information system or data warehouse? Try Centre (http://www.miller-group.com). Do you need a learning management system that can deliver courses on-line? Try Moodle. (http://www.moodle.org) Going Linux? Try the latest distribution of Edubuntu, based on the new Feisty Fawn release of Ubuntu. It comes pre-loaded with education specific software (http://www.edubuntu.org). How about a libary solution? Try OpenBiblio. (http://obiblio.sourceforge.net) How about Linux thin clients? Try K12LTSP (http://www.k12ltsp.org) You can use old PC's (remember those PC's businesses try to give you? Hint, Hint.) or buy brand new pre-configured clients for about $200.

The fact is, that for those districts that are willing to be pioneers and accept a few occasional bugs or forego some functionality for a period of time, open source solutions are coming into their own and maturing to a point where districts should consider using them in critical situations.

Many people always say get open source because it is free. That is not true and it is misleading. Open source must be supported and there are costs associated with that support. Open source often needs customization and there are costs associated with that effort. (Usually not $225 per hour). But over time, the total cost of ownership (TCO) tends to be far lower than that of a commercial alternative.

There are also the associated costs that can go away as well. Going open source can remove these licensing costs: (these are estimates only)

Windows Operating System - $50
Microsoft Office - $50 (use OpenOffice)
Windows Server - $2500 per server
Exchange Email - no idea but will guess $2,500 (use Zimbra. Comcast thinks Zimbra is good enough for its 12 million clients)
Microsoft SQL Server - $2,000 per server (use MySQL or PostgreSQL)
Many more could be listed.....

The real difference in open source is the word open. You get the source code and when you train people with the skills to modify the code, you have the flexibility that a commercial vendor takes away from you. State department changes a data collection requirement and you have PowerSchool? Guess what? $225 an hour to make the customization to fulfill the new requirement. You have an open source SIS? Only the cost of your IT guy and a fix in place much faster in most cases.

Open also means that your solutions can run on older HW, which can be a huge cost savings. I asked a friend in a large district how many PC's they had and he said about 35,000. I asked him if he had ever heard of OpenOffice. He said no, so I showed it to him and he was impressed that a free product had that many features. Let's do the math: 35,000 X $50 (M$FT Office license fee) = $1,750,000. So let's see at an average salary of $45,000 plus benefits, which probably comes to around $60,000, that buys me a teacher that is completely paid for for the next 20+ years assuming some raises along the way. By the way, that district must pay licensing every year for that M$FT software, so every year I add a new teacher that is paid for for the next 20+ years.

Also, by being able to use older HW, I can avoid the HW refresh cycles that are driven by new commercial products. Can you run Vista on your current desktop or laptop? Ummm, probably not and that is why HW vedors love M$FT. Imagine avoiding one HW refresh cycle for 10,000 computers like my friend just did. 10,000 X 1,000 = $10,000,000, which buys me 166 teachers for 8 years.

I can go on and on with numerous examples like this, but you should have the idea by now. Perhaps open source is worth a look.

Challenge Me Please!

Why isn't there somebody out there challenging the basic notion of having to pay high prices for administrative school software? It seems to me that with the budgetary pressures facing school districts, that some company will surface and provide quality open source software that can be supported and maintained for far less than the commercial alternatives. Why isn't it happening?

Am I way off base? Somebody challenge me and let's get a useful debate going on how we shift K-12 to an open source community software industry. Education is a collaborative community anyway on many other things. Why not open source software?

Open Source in Use at K-12 Districts

I recently wrote a post discussing the slow rate of adoption of open source alternatives in K-12. For this post, I thought I would give some examples of actual districts using open source alternatives in their districts as business as usual. Let's start with Plano ISD in Texas.

Plano ISD is actively researching and using open source software. Since 2000, they have been building and converting on-line courses to the Moodle open source course management application. For graphical work, Plano has rolled out Gimp, an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop. They are using Open Office and WordPress, an open source blog tool and weblog platform. In the back office area, Plano is using Linux in its server farms. You can read more about Plano ISD and its use of open source in this interview done with Jim Hirsch, the CIO.

Saugus Union School District located in the Santa Clarita Valley in Northern Los Angeles County decided to move to Linux as they encountered dwindling support from some of their application providers for the Novell platform. Saugus has become a case study for the CoSN open technology initiative. Saugus has converted 9 critical network related applications to open source alternatives and arer realizing multiple benefits including lower TCO, easier maintenance and better efficiency. You can read the case study here.

The State of Indiana is another example rolling out Linux desktops across the state. I spoke with Mike Huffman about it at the CoSN conference and what used to be minimal interest is now turning into majority interest with vendors coming from around the country to see it in action. You can read more detail about this effort here.

While adoption of open source is moving slowly in K-12, there leaders who are taking the first steps and realizing the potential of open source and the collaborative community model. If any industry can truly benefit from open source, it is K-12 education. If you are an educator, have you investigated open source? Try some of these links to popular open source web websites:

The Open CD - A project capturing quality open source applications and distributing them to interested organizations (http://www.theopencd.org/)

Moodle - Open source course management solution in widespread use around the world (http://www.moodle.org)

Open Office - A Microsoft Office like free productivity suite containing all of the same basic applications, and more, as MS Office. It is absolutely free and it absolutely works. I use it everyday. (http://www.openoffice.org)

Edubuntu - From the makers of Ubuntu, one of the easiest to install and use versions of Linux, comes an education specific version of Linux. It is excellent and easy for non-technical people to get installed and running. (http://www.edubuntu.org/).

Open Source Alternatives - A great website that allows you to find open source alternatives to popular commercial products. Includes links to the sites where you can get the open source software. (http://www.osalt.com)

School Forge - A Source Forge like site collecting open source software information specific to education. (http://www.schoolforge.net).

What is Holding Up Open Source in K-12?

I use MySQL to develop personal projects in my spare time. It is an easy database to install and manage and its performance is great. In fact, in some recent testing, MySQL outperformed Oracle. I was interested in the customer base for MySQL, so I checked out their customer page and was very impressed with the list of known clients across almost all industries.

I did some research and found a Forrester report on open source projects. Listed as the leading projects with clear development road maps, strong infrastructure and mature technology were MySQL, Eclipse. Apache HTTP Server. Apache Tomcat Application Server, LAMP and PHP. Most of these products are in critical application use around the world. Apache HTTP server runs about 2/3 of the world's web sites.

So why is K-12 education not adopting open source technologies? Look at the benefits:

• no license costs
• lower maintenance and support costs
• access to all the source code
• ability to be flexible with applications and make them specific to your needs
• open standards allow integration with other software
• the user is now in charge and not subject to recurring software upgrade cycles, which can also mean hardware upgrades

I often hear that "we don't have the skill sets", "our resources don't know these technologies", etc. What I don't hear is sound reasoning like "if I spend $5,000 and get this individual trained in these technologies, I can replace this application that costs me $5,000 in maintenance and support every year and requires me to do upgrades to get additional functionality further locking me into a proprietary model.

I would encourage districts and schools to "experiment" with small, non-critical applications to get their feet wet and explore the possibility of open source as an alternative. I think you will find that it definitely holds potential. Try a web-based form to collect some information, or a simple database application to try it out.

Open source is gaining in viability and those districts that do not begin to harness the potential will continue to spend valuable operating dollars that could be going to instructional resources.

Noodling on Moodle

I am deeply interested in open source and opens standard applications for the K-12 market. Having been an implementer of many different commercial software packages, I am amazed at the large amounts of money that schools and districts are paying for administrative software that is often times simply not good.

I remember the time very clearly when I was evaluating a student information system (SIS) and entered negative test scores, erroneous data such as letters in a numeric field and the SIS simply accepted the entries. I am sure that there could be some customization, but that would likely cost additional implementation dollars that this market can hardly afford.

Thus open source alternatives. Previously I have written about Centre, a young open source alternative to the commercial SIS systems. Today I want to talk about Moodle, an open source Course Management System (CMS). Moodle has over 150,000 registered users and documented over 20,000 sites using Moodle. There are 38 sites that serve 20,000 users or more and one that serves over 42,000. There are 35 certified Moodle partners that provide support and training services for schools and districts that use Moodle. Most of them offer customized development services as well.

It boggles my mind, that a proven open source system in use at over 20,000 places around the world has not achieved a strong foothold in the U.S. If a Moodle implementation can serve 42,000 users successfully, is can provide course management services for over 10,000 U.S. school districts and it is completely free.

Moodle for Windows is distributed in XAMMP, a great package combining Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and PHP, the base components required to run Moodle as well as other open source applications. It has a wizard driven install and a nice control panel like feature that makes for easy management.

Moodle also has a free course exchange where users from all over the world post courses that can be directly imported into Moodle. This truly the desired state of community software and one that is specifically targeted at K-12 education. Moodle has been successful for a number of reasons, but primarily because of the dedication of Martin Dougiamas, the creator of Moodle. Martin's unswerving dedication to Moodle is the reason for its success.

Like most successful open source software, Moodle has a community of developers continually adding modules and plug ins that can be downloaded for free from the Moodle.org site. The continuing growth of the community is ensured by a central organization that continues to support and develop the product. It is an example of how community based software can work.

So, why are you paying all of that money for commercial CMS?

K-12 - An Old Idea Whose Time Has Gone

K-12. A progression through a defined set of grades marking a student's progress towards higher education and eventual entry into the work force as a well educated individual ready to contribute to society. What does 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade mean? Some definition of a level typically associated with age that defines a student's progress. Does grade indicate mastery of content or standards?

Here is a radical idea: Eliminate grades and report progress solely on mastery of standards. Define a set of challenging curriculum standards that all students must master and then measure students on their progress of mastery. Forget grades and forget the defined school year. Facilitate student centered learning and anytime anywhere learning. If children want to advance faster than their peers then let them. If they want to study from home at odd hours, then let them.

Grade levels, high stakes assessments. the traditional school are all "old school" thinking. If I hire someone, I am looking for an individual that demonstrates a set of skills that they have mastered. Kids should learn based on a set of defined "skills aka standards". Progress should be reported as mastery of standards, not grades. High stakes assessments should be replaced with formative and summative assessments that measure progress frequently and in smaller chunks.

The concept of a a school and the process of learning needs to be reexamined. Perhaps K-12 is an idea whose time has gone. Perhaps the future report card will read: "Johnny has mastered 50% of his elementary and secondary education standards and is on track to complete those standards at age 16."

No Child Left Behind - The New Version

A little over 5 years ago, President Bush signed into law the legislative act of No Child Left Behind or NCLB. Arguably, it was a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation from the beginning and doomed to be rewritten, but credit should be given that someone took a stand against a system that is failing many of it students.

What we understand now, and many of us understood then, that the reliance on a single measure of high stakes test results was far too simple. Micahel Pitrelli, former assistant deputy secretary who helped draft the law, recently said the the legislation should be scrapped in favor of multiple variables that measure success. Pitrelli also recommends national standards and a national test in a recent Education Gadfly article. Wow, what an idea, national standards. I have written about standards in many previous posts and am still amazed that people just don't get the power of common standards.

Other things that I don't understand about the US DOE is why don't they push things that really contribute to student achievement? Mastery of Learning, good Instructional System
Design, quality conditions of learning and so on. Thomas Guskey in Implementing Mastery of Learning, clearly outlines a fairly bullet proof approach to ensuring student achievement. It ties in with Benjamin Bloom's theories that all children can learn, just at different paces. Jack Bowsher outlines an approach to sound Instructional System Design in Fix Schools First, an interesting book with some very sound methods. And I never seem to hear much from the US DOE about principles of sound instructional design, an approach that Robert Gagne developed near the end of WWII.

Often times, we look to measure the problem instead of examining why the problem is occurring in the first place. A high stakes assessment measures and reports the success or failure of the classroom. Knowing that the great majority of a student's achievement, or lack of, is determined by the classroom experience, why aren't we focusing on the classroom setting, professional development for teachers, a national standard integrated curriculum, standards for curriculum content, mastery of standards and technologies that are applicable to the way our students learn today?

One thing is for sure, NCLB will change and districts will have to change the way they collect and report data. How flexible are your systems and how easily will you be able to adapt? Software vendors are very hungry for these types of changes because they mean new versions, new license sales and more money. Consider open source and open standard solutions that allow you to control your environment and keep your operational budget dollars to put back into the classroom where learning happens.