Open Academic - Nice idea, but not yet...

Overview

This is a brief review of my trial of Open Academic as a possible Learning Management System, Semester 1, 2007.

What

I trialled Open Academic, a free and open source Learning Management Systems in Semester 1, 2007, along with a few other academic staff as part of the broader [Researching Online group at the University of Canberra].

Here's the unit website that was initially sketched out, but ultimately not implemented:

Survey Research and Design in Psychology

What I did was:

Tried to customise the look and feel of the homepage, style template, etc.
Address usability issues for users, such as sign-on, navigation, email communication
Tried to add/upload content, but found notable limitations and lack of flexibility in this area which ultimately lead me to abandon the trial early in semester

The idea

I was attracted by the prospect of a university being brave enough to embrace the possibility of incorporating free and open source software into teaching and administration.

The ideas behind Open Academic were appealing: Configurable integration of a series of different free and open packages for achieving different functions, including:

Drupal as a content management system
Moodle as a learning management system
MediaWiki as a wiki
Open ID to provide single sign-on

The reality

The reality was of course different to the idea. For starters, we were more or less just given an externally hosted, empty Drupal install about two week before the start of semester with limited support. That's a pretty tall order for a new LMS to perform under these conditions, so it probably no surprise that it proved unsatisfactory.

I was immediately frustrated by the lack of easy customisability of Open Academic. I persisted for a few weeks, but it become quite clear that there was no way the pace of development (by the developer and UC staff) would be quick enough for production quality with students.

I probably sent about 30 request/question emails over the three weeks I used Open Academic, with main themes revolving around:

Complexity of sign-on and sign-on management
Display names of users
Lack of capacity to include html code
Lack of control over look and feel
Lack of customisability
Lack of site structure conceptualisation
Bulletin-boards which didn't feed into email
Lack of clear relationship between units, groups, and overall aggregation of content
Lack of help documentation
Lack of integration with LDAP server
etc.

Instead of Open Academic, I implemented Plan B which was to back to finding my own solutions by combining various free, externally hosted sites and using gradebook functions in WebCT.

Reflections

The Open Academic concept still seems like a perfectly reasonable, if somewhat grandiose and unwieldy (i.e. a collection of open source packages adapted as a LMS). However, its nascent ("alpha") state of development lacked significantly as a user-friendly, intuitive LMS for staff and students. IMHO it was a long way off being a genuinely usable LMS and would need serious institutional committment from a small team over a 12-24 months to get it humming and singing.

Open Academic is worth keeping an eye on and could be worth looking at it again further down the track. Already, for example, the first release of DrupalEd has become available (we were testing an early trial version).

Rob Fitzgerald has been the only person I know to take this experiment further, see mashedlc.

Outcomes

One of the outcomes for me from this experiment, has been that it helped to further catalyse and inspire my growing desire to teach with an open philosophy and using open methodologies. I've synthesised this to mean, in practical terms, to strive to teach using free software, with open document formats, open access, and open licensing. These ideas are explored further here:
Journey into use of free software, open formats, open access, and open licensing in academia.

Conclusion

Open Academic is an interesting, future possibility, as a LMS, but is still in its early stages and is not a serious contender as a full production LMS due to usability and configurability limitations.