But the case for self-created software environments is a little trickier. I work at a university with a great, entrepreneurial IT staff who have thrown a lot of energy into various ‘custom’ applications for administrative functions and into customizing Blackboard for our use. And though I respect and support their work, I have to say their ‘custom’ applications (for things like graduate admissions [working pretty well] and academic personnel [a wrongheaded disaster in every way]) are rarely as polished as commercial software. Designing good complex environments is really hard, and requires not only substantial resources and a long wait from investment to return, but also years of iterations that (if those doing the work are competent and properly managed) make the environment better over time.

The challenges are great. Blackboard is certainly not ideal, and their habit of changing interfaces every 3-4 years, just as 1,000s of professors had finally figured out how to use the existing interface puts them up with Microsoft on my hate-list, but on the whole, they system now is smooth and doesn’t have the quirks and balks that our homegrown software has, even at its best.

Sadly, I’m skeptical about the ability of loose, non-profit and ad hoc coalitions of complicated institutions to have both the skills, the capital and the stamina to produce high quality online systems, at least for now.

But open source journals and avoiding sharks like Elsevier, Kluwer, and Springer: absolutely! Guest editing a special issue of a journal recently with one of these companies was a nightmare, including typesetting by diligent but poorly informed Sinhalese typesetters that rendered dates as numbers. Did you know that the American Revolution began in 1,776? Oy!

To second what Timothy Burke said, at least in the sciences this is a non-issue. The editing and refereeing of manuscripts is basically all done on a volunteer basis by faculty members. The only value that publishing companies added in the past was typesetting and physically printing and distributing the material, all of which required specialized equipment and skills.

Today with all of that online, the only things keeping the scientific community from going all open access tomorrow are:

1) Inertia
and
2) The fact that companies like Elsevier own vast amounts of the back catalog for many journals.

Where journal editors are paid or peer reviewers compensated, those costs could be borne by the kind of consortia I sketch out above. Essentially a good open-access journal needs funds for: the small costs of editorial work and the larger potential costs of ensuring access, preservation, and forward migration of the publication.

The question of whether we need strong filtering systems and whether existing peer review provides that function as well as it might is a different question, though. PLoS 1, for example, is providing a successful model that pulls inanother direction. But that’s a different discussion.

One comment you made about “for-profit publishers whose monopoly pricing has punched hundreds of universities in their unmentionables” (I assume you mean academic journals) caught my attention because it’s a debate that I’ve seen crop up from time to time. On face, it seems like a net benefit to education, and consistent with the philosophy of schools like Swarthmore, to have open-access academic publications. Something I’ve never seen addressed is the issue of quality control. While we’re talking about the importance of quality scholarship in education, it seems like we should be looking for more good filters rather than fewer. Even an open-access journal needs someone to do the editing, organize the peer-review, etc., and that requires funding. Some groups might get lucky and be funded by some university or philanthropist, but it seems that many others would be at risk of becoming a kind of highly intellectual crowd-sourcing. How could such a system continue to guarantee that articles in the American Historical Review, for example, are more objective and reliable than publications from the Heritage Foundation?

“Those responsible for scholarship at Dumbarton Oaks should remember that the Humanities cannot be fostered by confusing Instruction with Education…that gardens have their place in the Humanist order of life; and that trees are noble elements to be protected by successive generations and are not to be neglected or lightly destroyed.”

Obviously the first part of that quote is directly relevant to the discussion of MOOCs — but I include the last bit because I think nurturing a garden is a much more apt way of thinking about educating students than ‘transmitting information’ or ‘downloading data into their brains’ or whatever impoverished metaphor might be au courant these days.

In any case, that was a most satisfying rant, and echoes much of what I (someone who actually likes teaching online, but in an extremely interactive, labor-intensive, and hence not cheap, way) have been thinking.

I don’t think it falls to individual faculty to use Moodle or some other alternative–the point is that Blackboard has been an institutional purchase. Many IT staffs have to buy into a kind of one-size-fits-all infrastructure because faculty in general are so passive and illiterate about IT that they can’t be relied upon to seek and use tools on their own. I think you plausibly could have an IT operation at a university that took care of the root-level server and database infrastructure and then provided just-in-time support to faculty who were individually responsible for their main work toolkit (word processors, email, browsers, etc.)

I’ve suggested in a previous entry that one great thing about MOOCs is that they are effectively a new form of publication–a much enhanced version of an “educational book”. Which, by the way, lets us think about how faculty might participate–and be given credit for participating–in a MOOC without that being a way to get uncompensated teaching work out of them.