Educause 2008: BB and open source

Panel discussion on BB and open source.

# Michael L. Chasen, President & CEO, Blackboard, Inc.
# Serge J. Goldstein, Associate CIO and Director of Academic Services, Princeton University
# Charles Severance, Developer Network Coordinator, IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc.

Calls for open APIs more than source code access.

Question asked by panelists about whether you could unpack a BB export and use APIs to move into Moodle or Sakai.

BB: We can't put forward a universal statement that addressed all circumstances.

We would never do anything to prevent faculty and schools from extending elearning.

Sakai: People dismayed about the patent environment.

{This is turning into a put BB on the spot session}

BB defending their intellectual investment. Need to have some legal structures to be able to work against nefarious sorts (against best interest of education community).

How to balance need for resources for development (BB gets paid) and desire for openness.

There's nothing automatically good about releasing source code in the open. Distinguish btw open source and getting what you need to get done
--flow btw apache fdn and public is so open

Q: Problem of publishers with proprietary LMS's -- how can these LMS's be more open?

Chuck: this is a chicken/egg thing

Michael (not chasen): he's been pretty consistently advocating one place to go, systems interoperable, incl publishers; sakai connector just the beginning

Mchasen: BB wanting to dev facebook API, bb for iphone, bb for igoogle; we heard very strong views on both sides

{wonder why there isn't a history function on tweets}

Serge: the difficulty of localized problem solving introducing balkanization of data

Mchasen: moving from open APIs to web services approach to be more live and free flowing

Chuck: IMS learner information services, this standard undergone mjr rework, led by oracle, open philosophy (v open src). LIS designed to solve the fundamental problems; lite version purely rest based working with small company (School???)

Serge: web svcs terrific; let's you write php code rather than heavy weight java code; web services allows us to treat BB as a academic infrastructure system; we can build tools in PHP to add onto the LMS

Chuck: web services: moddle embarking on dev of web services (moodle hard to add modules now); LMS becoming a SOA that's becoming enterprise information, not a place to put your syllabus

In 2 years:

mchasen: opening up your LMS to where students are; trend around cloud computing (safe assign leverages cloud computing (everyone using safeassign); but admits that it probably violates FERPA to put all data up in the cloud; envision a day when a school will pick and choose some bb modules, some others

chuck: echoing chasen

good session