Have you heard the news? Harvard is changing its mission statement to read: "Harvard strives to create knowledge, to open the minds of students to that knowledge, and to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities, supported by a pervasive open source technology environment." Just kidding. But why wait for Harvard? It's time to move open source beyond the machine room at universities and put it into the top-level institutional strategies that support their educational mission. Here's why:
University technology decisions cycle, recycle and sometimes falter over tool choices while proprietary systems increase their monopolies and pricing. To escape this endless and expensive circle, IT decisions should be driven by an institution's core mission and values. For universities, open source technology is the only strategic choice that both aligns with and enhances their educational mission and values. IT choices should turn away from asking the narrow question "what tool will best serve this specific functional need at the lowest price today?" to ask instead "what tool will best serve this specific functional need in a technology environment that is fully integrated with our educational mission?"
Aligning an open source technology strategy with your mission can lead your institution to chose tools designed specifically for education, increase your control over your technological and financial destinies, allow you to build experts rather than rent software, integrate curriculum in a variety of disciplines with on-campus hands-on experience, support local economic development, and help design and build tools that change educational practices worldwide.
Adopting open source technology strategically can also give your IT unit many advantages over an agnostic practice, including coalescing on common platforms, increasing system integration, optimizing maintenance and development, building staff expertise, adhering more closely to technology standards, improving usability and accessibility, and improving data integration and dissemination.
Enterprise-ready open source technologies and support alternatives exist for every institutional profile and every campus need, including, Collaborative Learning (LMS), ePortfolio, Digital Repository, Group Collaboration, Research Collaboration , Assessment, Advising, Student Recruitment/Alumni Involvement, Faculty Development, Research/Grant Administration, Identity Management, Web/Mobile Communications, ERP (FIS/SIS), and Workflow.
Join this presentation to think through how your institution might start taking steps to move open source into its overall strategy.
