Open source software made a big showing earlier this month at the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) in San Diego. Presentations were made on a variety of open source topics including advocacy, programming, deployment, and education software.
Mike Huffman, Indiana Department of Education Special Assistant for Technology, did a presentation on the state of Indiana's InACCESS project, the largest K-12 desktop Linux deployment in the United States. With 24,000 Linspire desktop computers built by Wintergreen Systems rolled out at various high schools, the program has already saved the state about US$1 million. The deployment, which started in 2005, will grow to 170,000 computers within a year and could potentially reach over 300,000 within several years.
So why did the Indiana Department of Education choose Linux? At the presentation, Mike Huffman explains that despite the fact that the state had invested approximately US$100 million in technology for education during a ten year period, the average student only spent about 35 minutes a week using school computers. By switching to Linux and open source software, the state was able to save a significant amount of money and make computers more accessible to students. Although many claim that open source software is more difficult to use, Huffman comments that the "time needed for a Windows-using high school student to acclimate him or herself to the Linux desktop [is] 10 minutes."
Although the program has largely been a success, there have been difficulties as well. The significant number of new computers is placing additional stress on school technology directors, some of whom are concerned that they will not be able to continue providing effective network management in an environment with so many computers. In a blog entry, Mike Huffman describes various centralized management solutions, like Novell Zenworks Linux Management, and how they can be used to mitigate some of the problems faced by school personnel. The schools have also had some difficulty integrating support for Microsoft's Active Directory authentication solution.
Public education can sometimes be a budgetary black hole, and technology spending in the public school system is no exception. Here in California, the recently approved budget increases education spending by almost US$3 billion, bringing the total percentage of the state budget spent on public education to a lofty 58 percent. Open source software could potentially reduce the burden on taxpayers and help the state increase the quality and efficiency of public education. As Mike Huffman says, "As long as we keep waiting for big bags of cash to fall from the sky, we aren't going anywhere." I look forward to seeing open source migration programs emerge in other states as education software like Moodle becomes more popular and teachers begin to take note of success stories like that of the InACCESS deployment.
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