Chris Coppola has a good post up regarding Sakai adoption. Chris, in turn, is responding to a comment from Trace Urdan in Education Signals:
Sakai adoption is not meaningfully hampered by usability issues, but by obstacles to the risk/rewards of an open source solution to begin with. Wider Sakai adoption, we think, is more likely to come about by increased activity among its commercial supporters than by tweaks to the platform itself.
It is absolutely true that adoption of open source user-facing apps in higher education is particularly limited right now by the perception that there is not adequate commercial support (which is why I was particularly pleased to see Sakai’s Executive Director Michael Korcuska acknowledge the importance of the Sakai Commercial Affiliates in a recent blog post).
However, it is absolutely false that Sakai adoption “is not meaningfully hampered by usability issues.” I have spoken to people at more than one institution in recent weeks where decision-makers either chose not to implement Sakai or chose not to broaden their implementation of Sakai because of usability concerns. By the same token, I have spoken to folks recently whose universities have rejected other LMS platforms where user experience was a big reason for the decision. (Sakai is certainly not the only LMS with usability challenges. Not by a long shot.) The issue of whether you can actually…well…teach and learn with a platform is (thankfully) becoming a real and significant criterion in university adoption processes.
The Sakai community is doing the right thing by prioritizing user experience improvements. I have no doubt that success will impact adoption.
Michael,
I just want to make sure you didn’t mis-interpret my post. I agree that the user experience matters greatly. So much so that I’ve put some of my own effort into helping us improve on that front. As a matter of fact, our community has done a lot in the last year to improve the user experience and, as a user, I’m enthusiastic about the progress.
So yes the user experience can hamper adoption… but Sakai has a reasonably good user experience in many of the core areas and it’s getting better all the time.
There are still thousands out there that Sakai would be a great fit for, that have basic misconceptions about open source that need to be addressed. These misconceptions prevent Sakai from even being a consideration. This is the point in Education Signals I was agreeing with.
So assuming a great piece of software (which I believe Sakai is), the greatest barrier to widespread adoption is the perceived lack of support.
Sorry if I was unclear, Chris. I was taking issue with Trace Urdan’s original comment, not your response to it. I agree that support perception is a bigger adoption problem than usability perception. I just think that he oversimplifies the dynamics by dismissing usability as not having a “meaningful” impact on adoption.
Gentlemen —
Thanks for the discussion — for LMS/CMS dilletantes like myself this is invaluable.
I did not mean to imply that usability, functionality, design, or any other feature set was not relevant to the adoption process at the margin. I merely meant to say that the “elephant in the room” for the future of Sakai, I believe, is not feature-related, but commercial.
I have often suggested that the Blackboard analog is Microsoft. Blackboard may not have the superior product, but its business acumen renders these somewhat subtle distinctions essentially meaningless across the scope of the entire market.
We definitely agree there, Trace. The single biggest barrier to adoption for Sakai, Kuali, Moodle, etc., is the perception of support issue. Interestingly, I think this dynamic will change somewhat as hosted solutions pick up steam. If I’m not mistaken, LSU has chosen a hosted solution for Moodle. If I recall correctly, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of Sakai adopters are using hosted solutions. Blackboard is pushing its ASP solutions hard and a very high percentage of D2L’s business is hosted as well. A hosted model changes the support conversation somewhat. As standards that enable universities to migrate more easily from what system to another (e.g., IMS Common Cartridge, IMS Enterprise Services, etc.) improve and propagate, university IT shops may feel more comfortable relying on the service-level agreements of their ASPs to protect them.
We’ll see, I guess.
I should add that where we may disagree is in the definition of “on the margin.” I’m hearing increasing numbers of reports where usability has been a deal-breaker in purchasing evaluations. This is quite similar, in some ways, to the shift we saw in enterprise application purchasing decisions in the private sector during the 1990s. Early on, the IT departments ruled in terms of making these decision. Over time, though, as the software came to be seen as increasingly mission-critical, the lines of business that used the software became more and more assertive in the decision-making process. I’m seeing more Provosts and academic Deans involved in LMS purchasing decisions.
This also means that, to the degree that (a) support concerns and (b) migration pains can be reduced, there is an opportunity for the actual teaching and learning capabilities of the software (including but not limited to an evaluation of usability) could be come quite important in future evaluations, where they probably still aren’t critically important in many institutional purchasing decisions today.
Michael, I am glad, if indeed it is true, that “usability” is increasing in importance in the CMS selection process, because I can attest through my own involvement in a number of selection processes that in the past it was often not factored in nearly enough.
But I am also interested to know if you can point to examples of *how* people are rationally measuring the usability of these systems in their evaluations. My impression is that often usability was forsaken as a variable (or its impact felt less than rationally) in part because measuring it can be hard and take more time and effort than is afforded in the selection processes. I’m talking about more than just 5 point ratings on ‘how usable was this system’. Can you point to some good examples of where people have incorporated usability as a factor in their decision making in an exemplary fashion? I think other decision makers (as well as the designers of these systems) could benefit from seeing such examples. Cheers, Scott
I afraid that I don’t have any detailed examples, Scott. What I’m hearing anecdotally is the end result of evaluation processes, along the lines of “We ruled out System X because our evaluation committee found that it was too hard to use and didn’t meet the faculty’s needs.” I haven’t been let in on the processes themselves.