New lessons in course management: a group of universities have banded together to offer a low-cost course management software alternative; commercial vendors compete with new applications

University Business, Sept, 2004 by Jean Marie Angelo

The management team at UMassOnline, the online education department of the University of Massachusetts, initially invested $500,000 in its commercial CMS system, says David Gray, CEO. The department has, as well, paid the rising licensing fees. "These are relatively new companies that are small application firms. They had to reinspect their business models along the way so that there was capital to develop the products." Such understanding, however, doesn't mean that departments like Gray's aren't watching Sakai and open source efforts. "Open source isn't yet mature enough for us to use, but we might have a different story in one or two years."

Sakai's Ascent

The Sakai Project, which is loosely named after television's "Iron Chef" Sakai Hiroyuki, will include the best of the CMS systems built by the four universities, along with applications from the uPortal Consortium and the Open Knowledge Initiative. These six entities officially banded together in late 2003 to collaborate on Sakai, while working on some other open source projects.

"The systems at Michigan, Indiana, MIT, and Stanford were built in 1997 and 1998," explains Joseph Hardin, director of the collaborative technologies lab at UM, and chair of the Sakai board of directors. All four systems were due for upgrades. "We were looking for the next step," he says. "We are at a point where we can contribute to standards development and provide working collaboration."

Sakai is a $6.8 million endeavor. That total includes the $2 million in staff time and financial resources that each of the four universities have agreed to dedicate to the software's development. It also includes $300,000 in grant money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (www.hewlett.org) and $1.2 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (www.mellon.org).

By late July, 43 IHEs had agreed to pay $10,000 annually for three years to support Sakai. The group of early adopters includes the Foothill-de Anza Community College system (CA), which received a $600,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation to use and help develop Sakai software.

From July to September, programmers at Michigan, Stanford, MIT, and Indiana continued to refine the code to make it ready for use on their own campuses by fall 2004. An upgraded version is expected to be available in December. Sakai is meant to work with, and then replace, legacy systems, according to Hardin. Project founders also have designed it to work with commercial open source systems, such as Red Hat Linux.

Skeptics, though, don't expect the migration to Sakai to happen quickly. For the same reason most colleges and universities that use CMS have settled on using just one vendor, most will not want to run Sakai and a commercial software program at the same time. The staff costs to learn and support two systems will be too much. Schools will want to see that Sakai is a bug-proof, smoothly running software alternative before jumping on board. Otherwise, they will be adding to their costs, says Roy.