Adventures in Open Source: Lessons Learned at Purchase College Keith Landa SUNY CIT 26 May

Overview Purchase College Our vision for open Purchase Moodle – LMS Kaltura – video support Drupal, WordPress & OpenScholar Mahara – e-portfolios Big Blue Button – live classroom

Background Liberal Arts and Sciences plus Arts Conservatories ~4200 FTE Residential campus - F2F courses Liberal arts plus studio focus Some online course development COIL and international programming

Student Information System Library Information Systems Academic Analytics Campus Repository The View from 30,000 Feet Live Classroom

Focus on teaching & learning - Robust set of activities & resources - Add-on modules from the community - Moodle development pathway Costs - No licensing costs - Similar support costs Integration - Other systems - Web 2.0 world Flexible open architecture Purchase? Risk management - Risks of open source - Commercial products have different risks

Library reserves project Prior systems: paper forms, Google Docs Limited notifications Moodle block to mediate interaction between faculty, library and students in course – Course-based requests – Faculty and librarian dashboards – Course-based notifications

Campus lessons - Moodle LMS focus should be learning – Faculty AND student perspectives Change is hard, and exhilarating Choose the risk you’re comfortable with Importance of community critical mass for open source apps Clear roadmap for product development Leverage LMS to meet other campus needs

Purchase

Faculty use of video in Moodle YouTube resources very popular – Moodle multimedia filter – Embedding other video sites Web video not sufficient – Privacy, copyright needs Video uploads to Moodle – 150 MB limit per file – Playback issues – Course backups in the multi-GB range

Commercial/community hybrid - -

Kaltura-Moodle integration Video resource – Media added to Kaltura through Moodle – Upload bypasses Moodle (file size issues) – Playback controls Video assignment type – Student submitted videos – Video sequencing tools: content bank, timeline, transitions

Streaming video rights Librarian role in obtaining streaming rights Direct access to Kaltura publisher dashboard Upload & transcode video Schedule availability Provide embed code for Moodle courses

Campus lessons - Kaltura Good feature set SaaS plus community source model Developer/support community

WordPress, Drupal, OpenScholar WordPress -Implemented on campus before Moodle - -Some active individual blogs -Departmental use instead of homegrown CMS -e.g.: Drupal -Replacement for our home-grown CMS? -CampusEAI portal – includes CMS -Drupal for special projects - OpenScholar -Faculty scholarly web pages -Customized Drupal application

Why were we so interested? -Legacy faculty web page service -Faculty desire for self-service -Information reuse possibilities -External faculty profile pages

Ease of faculty updates -Editing existing content -Adding new items -Default layouts, widgets

Faculty choice of -features -themes/appearance Ability to add others Central content access However….

Campus lessons - OpenScholar Make sure application is ready for primetime – Default authentication, site creation – Server constraints Be prepared for community growing pains Persistence

Campus lessons – WordPress, Drupal WordPress – plug-in proliferation – Plug-in and version upgrades Initial decisions can be critical – WP config WordPress is easy for most users Drupal is powerful, can be daunting – Need for turn-key Drupal set-ups – Event scheduling, video

Student Information System Library Information Systems Academic Analytics Campus Repository Live Classroom

Questions? Keith Landa