Don't Stop at Gmail

Georgetown has recently taken important steps to ensure that it provides up-to-date technology for students and faculty. University Information Services formed plans to switch the e-mail system to Gmail and this past week, InterHall conducted a survey on students’ wireless Internet preferences. But the university should not stop at fixing publicly recognized needs like e-mail and wireless Internet access. Blackboard, the course management system that many Georgetown professors use to host class materials and facilitate discussions, is useful, but it is a privately owned system that costs the university in licensing fees. Georgetown should leave behind a system rented from an independent vendor and consider the cheaper, more flexible options available.

Just how much does Blackboard cost? According to UIS Director Beth Ann Bergsmark, Georgetown is under contract with Blackboard not to release the details regarding licensing fees for negotiation reasons. According to several other universities and a report by UIS coordinator James Farmer, however, annual license fees run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On the other hand, Sakai, an open source — meaning that modifications to the program’s source code are permitted — course management system and Blackboard competitor, costs nothing. Moodle, another comparable open source system, is also free.

Cost is not the only reason to move away from Blackboard. Sakai is a collaborative project developed by some of the best computer science universities in the United States — the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan; and Indiana University.

The project has several benefits. First, it’s open source, so when Georgetown discovers a bug in the program or needs to add functionality, UIS staffers can add in the code themselves. If they find that they are unable to, they can ask other universities using the system if they have developed the appropriate code or coordinate with them to create a solution. A privately owned system like Blackboard, however, requires the university to wait for an update from the software company before any major changes can be made.

Second, Georgetown would be contributing to the open source movement. The movement consists of programmers, academic institutions and even companies that create programs and release them for free. By providing user data and coding to help improve Sakai, Georgetown would be participating in a kind of philanthropy. Any improvements we made to the system directly or indirectly could potentially benefit the academic community as a whole. Every other institution could use the programs and any updates Georgetown provided for free.

At present, according to Bergsmark, Georgetown’s scholarly information services group is working on the Sakai project not as a replacement for Blackboard, but to supply additional functionalities.

However, Sakai is already used exclusively at major universities across the United States, including Yale University, Rice University, the University of Virginia, Rutgers University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Arizona State University, along with the original developers of the system — MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Michigan and Indiana.

Caution when considering any new system or technology is, of course, wise. Preliminary responses from faculty and students at Yale, though, have been positive.

Georgetown has never been on the cutting edge of technology. Changes to our e-mail system and wireless service have come slowly, and the university is still in the process of revamping data security following a major security breach last semester.

Here is an opportunity to cut costs without sacrificing user satisfaction, to participate in a dynamic programming project involving some of the nation’s top universities and to shake off our dependence on a for-profit vendor for support and updates. Georgetown has the chance, for once, to be in the forefront of campus technology, and this is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.

To send a letter to the editor on a recent campus issue or Hoya story or a viewpoint on any topic, contact opinion@thehoya.com. Letters should not exceed 300 words, and viewpoints should be between 600 to 800 words.