I attended the first European Totara conference last week. It was good to see a number of our clients there too! You can view some of the presentations here.

The Open Source community behind Totara (and the underlying system, Moodle, as well as the e-portfolio tool Mahara) certainly have some compelling arguments about the benefits of this approach! I was impressed with their mission, too: “To fundamentally change the marketplace for learning management systems”. Wow, and they might just do it.

We often – though not always – recommend open source systems to our clients. We think they’re worth considering for the following reasons highlighted at the conference last week:

• Much cheaper total cost of ownership – generally spend 80% less on the software itself, freeing up more of your budget for configuration, implementation and change emanagement to make the system actually deliver benefits!
• Lower risk – because you’re not tied to one supplier (whereas with most commercial tools, if you want to change supplier you also have to change the underlying system too).
• Better security. This one’s counterintuitive – the myth is often that open source code means lower security, but actually having the underlying computer code visible means that anyone (your own IT team included) can audit it. It’s a sort of “peer review” for software.
• Development by the community – it’s much easier to have your voice heard and get the system developed in the way you want.

So what’s the downside? We listened to a case study from Tesco (who are implementing Totara) and their main message was that because open source tools can potentially do so much, the most important thing is to spend time up front working out exactly what you want your system to do, and how this will fit with your business processes. Otherwise you risk a bloated, complex system that is too hard to administer and too overwhelming for learners. Start small, was the message.

Other titbits I learnt:

• BigBlueButton.org – an open source version of things like Webex. Looks good – we hope to have a demo version of this set up ourselves in a few weeks so let me know if you’d like to try it out with us.
• Moodle systems can be networked (linked to each other to securely share learning materials). In an increasingly collaborative, boundary-blurring world we think this is important. Take a look at our Thoodle page for more about this.

What do you think? Would you consider open source systems? Are you using them already? I’d love to hear from you.

About Tim Newham

Tim is the founder and Managing Director at Think Associates Ltd. He takes an active role in helping clients and has specialist interests in organisation development, process improvement and knowledge management. Tim has over 10 years’ experience of managing large-scale performance and learning processes in the public sector, and focuses on building the bridges between HR policy/process, line management requirements, and IT systems to make life easier for staff. Tim has a First Degree in Engineering Systems and a Masters Degree in Management.

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