This is a very good discussion of the major issue with open source projects.
This is the full text of the comments of one of the participants. It may
be a bit late for the official release of Jetspeed-2 but it is worth
considering.
The full article is at
*http://www.learningcircuits.org/2005/oct2005/adkins.htm
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*David Grebow,*/ /*Chief Learning Officer of Comcourse*
I’m not trying to straddle the answer; I really think its Yes and No.
Yes, Open Source LMS platforms are taking the innovative lead. No,
they’re not in the lead as products because there’s more to ‘taking the
innovative lead’ than just innovation.
From where I sit, with one foot in the Academic world and the other in
the Corporate, the Open Source coders are leaping ahead of the
proprietary LMS vendors in terms of innovation. But there’s more to
taking the lead than simply piling on innovative features and functions.
Using Claroline in Europe and Moodle in the United States, two programs
currently leading the LMS Open Source charge, I consistently hear three
major issues that Open Source needs to overcome in order to really take
the lead and beat their proprietary competitors.
First issue: a case of really bad GUI. Too many Open Source LMS programs
are just too hard to use. From talking with Open Source developers, the
reason seems to be that the real work is in the coding, and the rest is
not important (sound familiar?). In the proprietary world, GUI is
everything. If the user cannot easily and quickly learn how to navigate
around the system, then they will quit faster than you can press the
‘Esc’ key. Proprietary systems literally live and die by being part of a
user feedback loop. If the GUI gets in the way and disables the learning
process, then it’s toast. Open Source developers, it seems, cannot see
beyond their code.
Second issue: documentation is usually spotty, and formal training
programs are no better. Open Source LMS projects tend to have a major
problem with providing decent documentation—if you can find it in the
first place. Because there’s no contract that requires documentation,
it’s usually some general guidelines, almost a FAQ, instead of a
carefully written complete manual. And, they’re written by programmers
for programmers. The most common response to complaints about
documentation is "If they can’t understand it, they’re not ready to
install it.” Documentation should always be written for the user with
the assumption that they are simply trying to learn how to use a
program, not add more cool code.
Third issue: Open Source is plagued by the very thing that makes it
great. Creative programming, from many different programmers, drives the
small parts of code that can add up to the great features and functions
of an Open Source LMS. That same LMS also suffers from an almost endless
feature creep, and this time not at the request of the Customer. They go
way over the top because programmers can program all the innovative
features and functions they can imagine. And as we all know, imagination
is endless and boundless. It ends up so cool that the average user does
not know where to start.
Unlike most proprietary LMS programs that are usually driven by a small
and knowledgeable team, responding to the requirements of customers
gathered from a variety of sources, Open Source LMS suffers from the
“too many cooks” syndrome.
Again, it gets back to the successful innovative product mantra: It’s
not what the LMS program can do (i.e., how innovative it is), but what
it can do for you.
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