Embrace open-source collaboration

By Cynthia Villanti

What do open-source course management systems (CMS) have in common with higher education and with unions? They’re all about people working together to create something good.

The open-source movement has been making news in the corporate and technology worlds, and I hope academics and unionists start to pay even closer attention to it. Why? Because the basic philosophy of the open-source movement has far more in common with both academia and unions than with traditional top-down corporate hierarchies.

I use an open-source course management system in my first-year composition classes. After years of using a well-known proprietary CMS, I decided to leave it—and others of its ilk—far behind. Much more is to be gained, I’ve realized, from integrating open-source software into my courses.

First, open-source CMS packages have inherently collaborative structures, both in the process of development and in the resulting products. In terms of development, open-source CMS packages stem from a process of creation through shared knowledge. As defined by the online collaborative, Open Source Initiative, “open source promotes software reliability and quality by supporting independent peer review and rapid evolution of source code. … [S]oftware must be distributed under a license that guarantees the right to read, redistribute, modify and use the software freely.”

This process of development results in a collaboratively structured product. Because I have access to its source code, the open-source CMS that I use, Drupal, is fully customizable to suit my individual teaching needs. No proprietary CMS grants an educator such freedom. Further, all of my students can customize our class Web site’s appearance to suit their individual learning needs.

The features of open-source systems also tend to be far more collaborative and customizable. Some, for example, seamlessly integrate online discussion forums, blogs and a wiki-like collaborative book to enhance student communication in a way unmatched by any proprietary CMS. Thus, because I believe in collaborative theories of knowledge creation, teaching and learning, and because I believe that writing is a social act, these elements speak volumes to students about the value of social networks.

Another benefit of an open-source CMS is the unwavering sense of community that comes with its use. Although I’ve been teaching online and hybrid courses for more than five years, I’m still much more an English professor than a techie. I don’t know the code necessary to download and install my open-source CMS, but I’ve found people across the nation who are willing to help me and who respond to my e-mails within hours. With proprietary packages, I had to channel CMS-specific questions through my college’s IT personnel and hope for a reply. Extensive open-source education communities, on the other hand, devote a lot of time and expertise to creating, discussing, evaluating, improving—and then freely sharing—their CMS packages.

Finally, I like the open-source concept. I see colleges, unions and the open-source movement as natural allies. Like the many good people I’ve met in higher education unions, people in the open-source movement contribute because they recognize that the participation of each person benefits the collective whole, they believe in decentralized and democratic forms of organization, and they know that power in the hands of workers can change the world. Just as unions improve the processes by which higher education operates, open-source software improves the processes by which CMS products are created.

While open-source CMS packages don’t have the extensive budgets or marketing power of the major corporate course management systems, they do reflect a fundamental belief in democratic, collaborative knowledge creation—or “people power” as one of my union colleagues calls it. The bottom line is not money, but people working together to create something good.