Interesting to see the recent protests around education budget cuts in California. The CA budget cuts are part of a broader nationwide trend to further cut education budgets. It appears that the federal government will eliminate the Enhancing Education through Technology (EETF) program removing another $100MM from education budgets that could be used to fund useful technologies in schools. For schools and districts, this will mean further budget cuts often times translating into school closures and teacher layoffs.

What is troubling is that schools and districts continue to use proprietary software solutions that are very expensive, incur repetitive upgrade cycles and that are based on other proprietary software platforms. I have written before on how the cost of open source solutions, yes there is a cost when done correctly, and how this cost often times can be more than 50% less to comparable commercial solutions. Today, there are so many well established open source options to student management systems, options to learning management systems and even options to assessment systems that it is puzzling why more schools and districts are not considering using these systems. With TCO and annual costs well below 50%, it seems like there would be more of a move to these open source alternatives. Considering recent integration efforts, it just seems that there should be more consideration given to these alternatives.

Given that education is a community unto itself, it seems to fit perfectly into the open source community model. Imagine the synergy and cost savings that could result if schools and districts banded ideas and resources together in partnership with open source providers. Over time this would have the potential to return significant budget outlays to the classroom. And the classroom is where students learn and that is where the budgetary focus should be in all schools.

Have you considered open source in education? If not, try it out. Most of the mature education offerings have fully functional demos and you can download and try the solutions for free. I think you will find that these open source vendors have much to offer.