Adventures in Open Source: Lessons Learned at Purchase College Keith Landa SUNY CIT 26 May 2011 p://purchase.academia.edu/KeithLanda http://www.slideshare.net/keith.lan
Adventures in Open Source: Lessons Learned at Purchase College
Keith LandaSUNY CIT
26 May 2011
http://purchase.academia.edu/KeithLanda http://www.slideshare.net/keith.landa
Overview
• Purchase College• Our vision for open source @ Purchase• Moodle – LMS • Kaltura – video support• Drupal, WordPress & OpenScholar• Mahara – e-portfolios• Big Blue Button – live classroom
Background
Liberal Arts and Sciences plus Arts Conservatories
~4200 FTE
Residential campus - F2F coursesLiberal arts plus studio focusSome online course developmentCOIL and international programming
StudentInformation
System
LibraryInformation
Systems
AcademicAnalytics
CampusRepository
The View from 30,000 Feet
LiveClassroom
Focus on teaching & learning- Robust set of activities & resources- Add-on modules from the community- Moodle development pathway
Costs- No licensing costs- Similar support costs
Integration- Other systems- Web 2.0 world
Flexible open architecture
Why @ Purchase?
Risk management- Risks of open source- Commercial products have different risks
Library reserves project
• Prior systems: paper forms, Google Docs• Limited notifications• Moodle block to mediate interaction between
faculty, library and students in course– Course-based requests– Faculty and librarian dashboards– Course-based notifications
Campus lessons - Moodle
• LMS focus should be learning– Faculty AND student perspectives
• Change is hard, and exhilarating• Choose the risk you’re comfortable with• Importance of community critical mass for
open source apps• Clear roadmap for product development• Leverage LMS to meet other campus needs
Video @ Purchase
Faculty use of video in Moodle
• YouTube resources very popular– Moodle multimedia filter– Embedding other video sites
• Web video not sufficient– Privacy, copyright needs
• Video uploads to Moodle– 150 MB limit per file– Playback issues– Course backups in the multi-GB range
Commercial/community hybrid-http://corp.kaltura.com/-http://www.kaltura.org/
Kaltura-Moodle integration
• Video resource– Media added to Kaltura through Moodle– Upload bypasses Moodle (file size issues)– Playback controls
• Video assignment type– Student submitted videos– Video sequencing tools: content bank, timeline,
transitions
Streaming video rights
• Librarian role in obtaining streaming rights• Direct access to Kaltura publisher dashboard• Upload & transcode video• Schedule availability• Provide embed code for Moodle courses
Campus lessons - Kaltura
• Good feature set• SaaS plus community source model• Developer/support community
WordPress, Drupal, OpenScholar
WordPress-Implemented on campus before Moodle-http://blogs.purchase.edu-Some active individual blogs-Departmental use instead of homegrown CMS-e.g.: http://tltc.blogs.purchase.edu
Drupal-Replacement for our home-grown CMS?-CampusEAI portal – includes CMS-Drupal for special projects-http://drupalsites.purchase.edu
OpenScholar-Faculty scholarly web pages-Customized Drupal application
Why were we so interested?-Legacy faculty web page service-Faculty desire for self-service-Information reuse possibilities-External faculty profile pages
Ease of faculty updates-Editing existing content-Adding new items-Default layouts, widgets
Faculty choice of-features-themes/appearanceAbility to add othersCentral content access
However….
Campus lessons - OpenScholar
• Make sure application is ready for primetime– Default authentication, site creation– Server constraints
• Be prepared for community growing pains• Persistence
Campus lessons – WordPress, Drupal
• WordPress – plug-in proliferation– Plug-in and version upgrades
• Initial decisions can be critical – WP config• WordPress is easy for most users• Drupal is powerful, can be daunting– Need for turn-key Drupal set-ups– Event scheduling, video
StudentInformation
System
LibraryInformation
Systems
AcademicAnalytics
CampusRepository
LiveClassroom