Sakai Foundation Board Platform: Vision for the Technology

I am honored to announce that I have been nominated to the Sakai Foundation Board by current Board member Ian Dolphin on behalf of the University of Hull. Over the next few weeks between now and the election, I’m going to outline my platform in series of blog posts, starting with this one about the future direction for the Sakai platform that I would like to help bring about.

Within every university I talk to these days, I find three factions with respect to instructional technology. How big or powerful each faction is and who is in it varies from place to place, but the factions are always the same:

1. Give me something off-the-rack: This group wants the comfort and benefit of traveling with large numbers of colleagues. On balance, they value a system that has been proven to work fine for their peers at peer institutions. They fear the slipperly slope of customization and worry about their institution’s ability to provide adequate support.
2. Give me a custom-tailored suit: This group still accepts the notion that a single, centrally-supported system is the best practical option but has specific ideas about what that system should look like. In some cases they may be committed to a particular pedagogical approach (either because their subject matter dictates it or because they have a general philosophical commitment). In other cases they may have an ongoing commitment to researching new educational technology.
3. I reject dress codes: This third group has become disillusioned with the limitations of the centrally supported online learning environments that they have experienced to-date. They believe that evolving a better learning environment is of paramount importance and that the in-house options they have been provided with so far lag badly behind the rapid and exciting development that they see on the internet. While they may miss some of the benefits of central support, they feel that the trade-off is worth it, on balance.

I emphasize that I see evidence of all three groups at every single school that I visit. Often the dominant faction, whichever it may be, tends to downplay or even dismiss the presence of the others. But they are always there.

If you look at the breakdown of which factions tend to be dominant at schools today, the majority of schools are clearly still dominated by Faction #1. I would guess that something on the order of 85% of this schools fall into this category, in part because of economics. On the one hand, a steadily increasing number of universities see it as in their best interest to have a coherent blended and/or fully online learning program, either as a defensive move to show prospective students that they keep up with the times or as a revenue generator. (Many of the public colleges have the mission driver of increasing educational access as well.) On the other hand, support costs are perceived to be lower with an out-of-the-box solution. (This doesn’t always turn out to be the case in reality, but universities tend to be pretty bad at knowing their real costs, much less projecting future costs given different alternatives.) Furthermore, out-of-the-box systems are perceived to be more reliable because they are widely tested and because there often is a robust support market around them. (Again, this isn’t always true in reality, although it is probably true as a generalization.)

In contrast, Faction #2 dominates in a relatively small number of mostly well-resourced universities. The Sakai community is heavily tilted in this direction, but pretty much every platform–whether it’s open source or proprietary–has at least a few of this type on-board. For example, Penn State has a very substantial ANGEL development shop; the same can be said for Georgetown and Blackboard. To date, I’m not aware of a single campus where Faction #3 has gained dominance (although I expect some of you will educate me with examples), although part of this may be because the folks dominating today’s Faction #3 coalitions tend to be looking to stage more of a secession than a coup. I expect this to change over time. As the gap between what is available in the wilds of the internet and what is available in the walled gardens of the LMS continues to grow, more and more teachers and students will demand that the university find ways to keep up with the innovations that are freely available online. You will start to see more Faction #3 members who are motivated by immediate practical demands rather than ideological commitments. When that happens, the influence of Faction #3 will also start to grow in the balance of power on campus.

I believe that this shift is likely to happen rather suddenly with relatively little advance warning. It will be a tipping point phenomenon. It will be a market disruption. When it comes, the platforms that are service-enabled and have the capability to provide connective tissue that links together various tools that exist out “in the wild” and supplements them with learning-specific capabilities will win. It is an open question just what the balance will be between central support/control and an anything-goes environment, but the main point is that campus communities will need a technology base that can enable them to set and adjust this balance based on what’s right for the teachers and students rather than on the limitations of the technology. So the best service-enabled framework will win out in the long run. Of course, in the short (and even medium) run, any platform that wants to reach the finish line must do a good job of satisfying Factions #1 and #2, since they are dominant today.

Where is Sakai in all of this? Sakai was conceived as being able to satisfy all three factions–as both a service-enabled framework and an enterprise bundle. That was the theory. In reality, it has not yet achieved its full potential for satisfying any of these three groups. It is closest with Faction #2, which is dominant in most of the Sakai early adopters. It is making progress toward pleasing Faction #1 with efforts such as the usability improvement initiative and the Sakai Kernel Roadmap. With respect to satisfying Faction #3, I see a lot of interesting experimentation but no coherent community-wide effort yet.

This is probably the right balance of priorities for Sakai. It must offer a better out-of-the-box experience for teachers, students, and system administrators alike if the project is going to grow and thrive. But all of that improvement will be of limited value if Sakai is not ready as a platform when the tipping point comes. I believe that the Sakai community needs a roadmap for its future as service-enabled framework–a roadmap that is embraced by the community as a whole and properly resourced. I also believe that the community does not have the internal resources to do this work while also addressing the more immediate priorities such as improving usability and supportability. Therefore, one of my goals as a member of the Sakai Foundation Board would be to seek external sources of funding for the purpose of evolving the framework. Sakai has a compelling story to tell in this regard. It has great potential. And as the notion of distributed learning environments increases in visibility and popularity, I believe that various funding sources will see compelling reason to support the Sakai community in this regard.