I picked this one up via Stephen Downes' OLDaily. The Kiwis are apparently moving over to the open source VLE/LMS Moodle big time. Their Open Polytechnic is leading a consortium project with a budget of NZD 1 million for open source procurement. You might expect me to be cheering this one on but … While I feel a lot more comfortable with institutions (or consortia thereof) not handing over de facto control of what is, or will become, a key part of their technical and pedagogical infrastructure to commercial interests, let me remind you of a quote from my Be afraid … be very afraid! posting of 11 April last.
“The Connecticut implementation of WebCT Vista is expected to expand over time to include private institutions and K-12 schools in the state, all of which will be able to leverage the existing contract by participating in a consortial purchase, thereby reducing their costs.”
Now consider the following from the Polytechs migrate to Moodle story.
“The Open Polytechnic, Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology, and six other polytechs are already using the system. Twelve other tertiary institutes, including four universities, will likely migrate to Moodle by July, Mr Wyles says. It's also being deployed at 10 secondary schools.”
Notice the similarities? There's a different ethos, but apparently a common goal, i.e. to consolidate around a single solution. If that's the case there are issues aplenty buried in there.
As long as the developments and knowledge find their way back to the growing global Moodle community I can certainly see benefits from some big players and developers migrating to this platform … because platform is what Moodle looks like becoming. I suppose my concern is that the rather seductive concept of there being THE SOLUTION doesn't just lead to us substituting the dangers of proprietary monopoly for a de facto open source one.
As with my earlier Connecticut example in Be afraid … be very afraid! the key justification for the decision in New Zealand appears to be financial:
“Project manager Richard Wyles says the polytechs started investigating open source as a way of cutting costs. He estimates that using Moodle instead of proprietary software will save the Open Polytechnic about $50,000 every year in licence fees alone.”
So if the financial argument is, and remains, the primary driver does this mean that all e-learning development must now be done in Moodle? Does this mean there is no scope for the development or use of 'e-tools' which are not part of the Moodle architecture? Is diversity only permissible within the constraints of the selected platform, albeit a fairly benign one, free of development constraints and licensing fees?
I'm quite a fan of Moodle and, like many others, I can see it's got bags of potential and that the Moodle community can only benefit from the flurry of interest. Also, Moodle is certainly focusing the minds of the vendors of proprietary VLEs/LMSs, and that's got to be good thing. But there is no one solution no matter how much we would like this to be the case and, so, institutions (or consortia thereof) need to also build some headroom into their strategies which will allow for future Moodles (or whatever) to emerge.
An open source monoculture is still a monoculture and monocultures tend to get monotonous and prone to disease.
