Agile/Scrum posts within Higher Ed Jobs.

Methodology

Two “job agents” were created using Higher Ed Jobs’ (HEJ) providing weekly reports of new jobs posted to the job search site (see HEJ-AgileVaAllData ): “Agile/Scrum” and “All IT Jobs.” The search criteria for the reports are:

All IT Jobs Agent

Agile/Scrum

However  a more interesting scenario might be: Moodle buys Blackboard…

I wonder what might be the affect of a fund raising campaign, a-la Wikipedia, which raised $6.2 million in 2008 and $7.5 million in 2009? With $13.7 million, Moodle could buy 394,926 shares of Blackboard at today’s price of $34.69. Admittedly that’s only 14%, but in only a few years Moodle could become the controlling interest in Blackboard. I will admit, Moodle’s 953,597 “registered users“, are far fewer than Wikipedias “three million active contributors”. While the number of registered users (those who administer Moodle sites) would obviously be less than total users (the millions of faculty and students who use the LMS for course work), I suspect only the site admins would choose to donate (and only a percentage of those). Using Wikipedia’s numbers as a basis for estimation–3 million users = 7.5 million dollars–Moodle might expect to raise $2,383,992. At this rate it would take several years to gain a controlling interest (all while “investing” in your competitor’s product).

Another approach might be to request (or “license”) current and future Moodle adopters to donate the equivalent of one year’s licensing fees of whatever system the campus was on prior to Moodle. For example, if an institution was paying $20,000 annually to license Blackboard, that money would be paid to Moodle for the first year of use after migration. According to North Carolina Community College System’s Feasibility Study Report the average cost savings for implementing Moodle per campus is $21,817, or, $11.66 per student. Using these numbers, the above “licensing” approach would yield $1,195,767,953 based on money raised from registered sites (54,809 registered validated sites x $21,817) or $444,907,110 based on the number of users (38,156,699 users x $11.66). Either of these amounts would provide enough to gain a significant interest in Blackboard at its current value of $1,189,520,100 ($34.69/per share x 34.29M shares).

Just thinking…

Thinking a bit about this, I wonder what other mission-critical services and systems currently found on campus will soon be dismissed: and I ended up with the campus itself.

In order to make this point, let’s pretend that the college campus as we know it today never evolved–rather the dominate model for education was home-schooling and distance-learning, based on practices related to correspondence schools. Instead of students packing up and heading off to school, institutions sent students all of their required educational materials to their home. I am sure folks who currently home school their children, as well as the growing number of adult and non-traditional learners attending institutions of  higher education remotely through learning management systems, can offer much better reasons as to why this approach is actually better than the traditional residence model than I can. However, as that is a topic for another discussion, and I am only trying to illustrate an alternative world that could have evolved other than the one we know today, please allow me a little latitude and let’s pretend that the college educational experience is remote, distributed and independent and facilitated by virtual and personal learning environments and the various technologies, tools and techniques associated with today’s Internet-based learning communities.

Imagine then–as these on-line universities forge ahead delivering education–someone in the administration proposes to develop a residential campus. Imagine the discussions that might take place at the various cabinet, departmental, division and faculty meetings:

So wait, you are proposing that the college build a whole city for 10,000 students, including: apartment buildings for them to live–with all of the accommodations they would need like phone, cable, network, etc.; buildings with rooms to hold classes in various sizes, seating arrangements and presentation/educational technologies; dining areas and food courts; parking lots; recreational facilities; and then hire thousands of additional staff to serve the students and maintain the facilities–who will also need all sorts of services and accommodations?

Consider the total investment required to build, maintain and extend a physical campus, versus those costs associated with providing on-line education. And, if you can remove your personal bias cultivated from your own experience within education as a student and/or faculty/staff member (for me that’s seven years as a undergrad and graduate student and twenty working in higher education on a physical campus), consider how you would react if you were in that meeting taking place on a virtual campus, and someone proposed developing a residential campus.

So, and I know I am not the first person to question this, where is the campus itself on that scale from innovative to key-differentiator to industry-standard to indifference to wasteful?

Currently when one assesses an LMS, the set of tools within the system is considered paramount in the selection process. Tied to feature analysis might be other related functionality issues, such as the pace of development of the embedded tool set native to the system, the roadmap for deploying new tools/features within the system, and/or integration between the system and other enterprise applications.

But consider what would happen to the “Learning Management System,” specifically the “System” if Bedework was integrated. What if Moodle and Sakai both deployed either Bedework in their native distributions or provided interfaces for Bedework integration. To the end users, it would appear that both Sakai and Moodle had just released an updated version with enterprise calendaring: ideal for comparing course schedules with campus schedules, integrating personal events with course or campus events, etc. But, what does this mean architecturally and even more interestingly, organizationally for each project, Bedework, Moodle and Sakai?

For Moodle and Sakai what does the system in learning management system mean now? How do all three projects manage development? What other services might be included in this model stretching the system until it pops: discussion forums, gradebooks, wikis, blogs etc?

Once two campuses or Moodle and Sakai themselves embed the same tool, the LMS is dead…

…maybe it already is: see this and this.

There are a variety of specifications associated with web services. These specifications are in varying degrees of maturity and are maintained or supported by various standards bodies and entities. Specifications may complement, overlap, and compete with each other. Web service specifications are occasionally referred to collectively as “WS-*”, though there is not a single managed set of specifications that this consistently refers to, nor a recognized owning body across them all. The reference term “WS-*” is more of a general nod to the fact that many specifications are named with “WS-” as their prefix. This page includes many of the specifications that might be considered a part of “WS-*”. -Wikipedia

Yes, web services are more than just the aggregation and presentation of widgets (oh, that’s gadgets now), but for all practical purposes WSDL is now “Add Stuff,” (or more appropriately, Gadget API’s and Designer) as well as the ever-growing list of internal Google services (g-mail, google apps, etc.). Not exactly analogous I know, but I guess I am just wondering how development of services might be affected. Will (how long before) folks primarily develop for Google, thus requiring a Google interface for accessing remote services?

So-now the lame part-I am going to coin g-* (pronounced like WS-* as WS star). Of course… “g-*” by Patrick Masson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Sparked by a tinderbox of economic jitters and technology backlash, a recent thread of industry discussion cries out, ‘SOA is dead!’ Although many have had fun with the discussion, it is in fact quite misguided. No prior industry initiative for IT architecture has had an impact as positive and broad-reaching as service-oriented architecture (SOA). But SOA’s impact is only part of the story: You have many more technology initiatives besides SOA. You need a bigger architectural vision that encompasses SOA, business process management, event processing, Web 2.0, and much more besides. Although SOA is far from dead, it should be buried inside a larger vision.

As someone who has attempted SOA in the past, and who is working on similar initiatives in my current position, I am happy to see the emphasis on business process management and event processing. SOA’s detractors often complain about its complexity–the integration of disparate technologies and interoperability of a variety of tools based on unique or specific protocols, specifications and standards. However the difficulty (consternation) often attributed to SOA is really a manifestation of the complexity inherent to an organization. As SOA implementations are actually derived from business processes, understanding those is fundamental to an SOA architecture. Quite honestly, many organizations simply do not understand how they operate within functional areas, let alone across units. In my experience, when a systems architect undertakes an SOA project, it is actually the business analysis that proves most hazardous to project success, rather than any technologies or architecture.

Heffner offers, “These types of misconceptions and limited strategies give SOA a bad name because their focus on technology separates business value and SOA,” He continues, “These strategies portray SOA as a technology savior rather than a tool (and a very important tool) in a business value tool box. Even worse, when the difficulties occur that are a natural part of introducing something new, a technology-focused model for SOA provides limited thought processes and models for resolving those difficulties.”

Data warehousing only works if an organization understands how data is collected, associated and accessed and service buses and messaging require an understanding of an organization’s business services, processes, actors and the events/rules that drive them.

Finally, Heffner offers a few strategies for implementing a SOA environment (note the operational, not technical slant):

1. Treating SOA as a business design concept.
2. Using lightweight strategy to guide delivery of today’s business benefits (street-level strategy).
3. Doing integrated, simultaneous design of both business and technology (concurrent business engineering).
4. Using a coherent business service portfolio management process to drive reuse.
5. Approaching all aspects of SOA maturity with an evolutionary mind-set and strategy.
6. Having a variety of strategic and tactical investment approaches for SOA.

Business analysis, in my experience, has been the greatest barrier to SOA, not the technologies.

Rather than offer any thoughts on the buy-out and what it might mean to Blackboard users, Angel users or even the entire LMS industry, I’d like to focus on how the discussions align with current ideas, perpetuate/counter misconceptions, or, have evolved from traditional views on the viability of open source.

With things moving so fast, or at least the comments through blogs and twitter (#auc09, #bbplusangel), etc. (the announcement was made on May 6th and the Angel Users Conference was just this week), I am sure most folks are reacting rather than assessing, but I am struck over and over by the comments being made by those on the ground working with an LMS and those reporting on the acquisition: everything from misconceptions to downright ignorance regarding open source projects and adoption.

Jeffery Young, of Today’s News in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported in an article titled, Blackboard Buys Another Rival, to Customers’ Dismay, “Some experts predict that more colleges will now turn to open-source alternatives that give them greater control over their own destinies (but which often require more effort by campus employees to run).” Requires more effort by campus employees to run? This is simply untrue. Running Sakai or Moodle out of the box does not require greater resources than running Blackboard or Angel. The infrastructure (hardware, supporting systems, networking, etc.) of running these systems are comparable. The skills needed by staff to install both the hardware and software (systems administration, programming, etc.) is comparable. If a campus chooses to extend the functionality of their LMS then, yes, they might need more (or different) staff than if they were running that same LMS natively. But this would be applicable for any campus, whether working with Sakai or Moodle code or developing Building Blocks for Blackboard or Nuggets for Angel.

If the point of this statement is that an open source option requires campuses to support these systems themselves, this too is untrue. Longsight, rSmart, Unicon and others provide technical and end-user support for Sakai. Campus Management, Classroom Revolution, Moodle.com, Moodlerooms, Remote-Learner and others provide the same for Moodle users.

Importantly, this argument–often used by those either ignorant of, or opposed to, open source options–has never been true. What is true is that open source deployments have traditionally been supported by alternate models that most campus decision-makers are not familiar or comfortable with. But now, even traditional service agreements through commercial providers are available, making this comment–once arguable in the past – simply false today. Mr. Young, please correct your article.

Later in the article, Blackboard’s president and chief executive, Michael L. Chasen, is quoted, “In the end, he said, colleges will choose Blackboard over open-source options because buying software works better for most colleges than being part of a do-it-yourself project, which he said takes more staff time to customize. ‘I really don’t believe it makes sense,’ he said.” Really? Let’s take a look at what makes sense for Blackboard…

Netcraft reports (see graphic) a website’s operating system, web server, and netblock owner together with, if available, a graphical view of the time since last reboot for each of the computers serving the site. I used the Netcraft “What’s that site running” service to see if Mr. Chasen’s observations regarding colleges, also applied to companies, again, that buying software works better than being part of a do-it-yourself project. Apparently not. According to the Netcraft report, which included 51 Blackboard hosted sites (where Blackboard Inc. hosts the campus’ LMS as a service), 41 instances are running the Blackboard LMS in a Linux/Apache environment, 6 are running on Windows and 4 could not be determined. Apparently, open source “makes sense” for Blackboard but not campuses. In addition, the report also lists another 25 sites hosted by Abovenet Communications, Inc. which are all hosted on Linux/Apache servers: I guess Abovenet’s hosting environment doesn’t make sense either.

Mr. Chasen also noted that using open source, “takes more staff time to customize.” Again, as stated above, running open source does not require any customization. I wonder what customizations Blackboard has had to undertake to run Linux/Apache, or run Blackboard on Linux/Apache? With 41 instances, I would suggest Blackboard hosted campuses call and request to be migrated to a Windows platform so that costs associated with the required customization can be reduced and thus their hosting fees.

Included in the Action Plan is :

To help bring together the online debate around this Action Plan, we’ve set up a public page which contains links to blog posts, news stories and tweets about UK government, open source and open standards. If you write about this online, please use the tag #ukgovOSS to help us find your comment.

The approach used by the Council is completely in line with the the open source methodology of collaboration, many eye-balls, iteration, etc.

In addition to promoting the use of open source software, the new policy also emphasizes open standards and encourages the re-use of IT solutions in the public sector.

Among the 10 points of the government’s action plan are the following:

Something to shoot for…