The State of Adoption of Open Source in Higher Education

This is not easy to assess. Open source software is difficult to track because of its liberal distribution process, and higher education constitutes a small niche of overall users. At this point in time, adoption of open source in higher education appears to be a “tale of two cities.” Adoption rates of the above mentioned non-higher education products by larger universities probably parallel open source adoption rates in the larger market in both magnitude and growth. We don’t know this with certainty, but the sound adoption logic used in the market at large appears to prevail in the large universities that are selecting Linux, Apache, etc. However, adoption by smaller colleges is probably muted due to lack of resources and greater dependency on less web-oriented legacy platforms.

The 2004 National Survey of Information Technology in US Higher Education by the Campus Computing Project (http://www.campuscomputing.net/) [3] indicated that most institutions surveyed felt that open source would play an increasing role. Yet, only 25% or so indicated that open source would be a viable alternative for ERP applications. Large universities clearly indicated more favorable inclinations toward open source than small colleges.

As for specific higher education focused products, there is one, uPortal, which appears to have made a significant penetration in the higher education enterprise. On its web site uPortal notes 79 institutions that have deployed uPortal and 68 in the process of implementation. Another visible open source product is Sakai, a course management system (CMS) option that uses uPortal. Although still in early testing with only a handful of deployments, Sakai has garnered significant exposure and notoriety. Based on a Mellon-grant funded collaboration between several top tier institutions that had successful versions of their own “homegrown” CMSs, Sakai was recognized by a very impressive 75% of the respondents in a quick survey conducted by A-HEC (download the results of the quick survey at http://www.a-hec.org/media/files/A-HEC_os_survey_report_050305.pdf) [4]. The Sakai web site lists 68 institutional partners. Another open source CMS initiative, Moodle, is more focused on individual users. The Moodle web site claims an impressive 3315 “registered sites”.

There are several other lesser known, but potentially important higher education focused open source initiatives. These include the Open Source Portfolio Initiative (OSPI) focused on student portfolios, an open source financial system (Kuali), and an open source legal peer-to-peer file sharing initiative (LionShare). Find links to the web sites of the initiatives we are currently tracking at http://www.a-hec.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=9 [5].