Re: [seul-edu] [Fwd: Alternative to Web CT?]

["Jay Sun" <js9s@lycos.com>]

WebCT is considered the dinosaur in the "industry",  and there are many proprietary alternatives.  do a search for "instrumental technology " on google will give you at least 8 distinctive ones, and there are "market research" papers if you don't mind paying for them.

However, as you said, the technology is not "difficult", it is the nature of the application  which is ourside the competency of OpenSource. It is not an end-user software, such as KDE or Gnome; it is not an infrastructure software, such as LINUX, apache, openLDAP, zope, php, etc;  it is an "enterprise application", and that means there are a lot more, about 90% more from cost perspective, to implement such systems than just writing the software, and marketing is just a small portion of the 90%. Couple of good coders spend couple of weeks can give you such a system, and youself may opt to use it. However, try to get other teacher to use it, or better yet, try to get the whole school use it.


Jay Sun.
IT4School International, L.L.C.
http://www.it4school.com


--

On Fri, 16 Nov 2001 15:18:59  
 Doug Loss wrote:
>XIAO Gang wrote:
>
>> Please forward this message to SEUL/EDU list. Thanks!
>>
>> I have read people talking about free software equivalences of Web CT.
>> In my opinion, it is of vital importance for the future of education
>> that free software occupy the market of IT educational platforms. The
>> consequence of a proprietary software taking the monopoly on this
>> platform market would be exactly what we experience today with W$.
>>
>> This makes me eager to offer my contributions helping to change the
>> trend. With my experience of WIMS (http://wims.unice.fr/), I estimate
>> that the actual software development is not a hard task. However, this
>> very experience tells me that the real difficulty lies in the
>> 'marketing' side, that is, to make people accept the free software
>> alternative. Here the problem is not only at the users' level, because a
>> viable platform needs content development at first place.
>>
>> In order to make things more clear, I would like to get answers to the
>> following questions.
>>
>> 1. What do people (well, you) expect from such a plaform? (Everything,
>> from the very beginning, right up to dreams.)
>>
>> 2. What are the existing free software 'equivalences' of Web CT?
>> Technically, do they compare favorably with Web CT? If not, what are the
>> shortcomings? If yes, why are they not making more noise than Web CT?
>>
>> 3. Are there already several free softwares fighting with each other for
>> dominance, like KDE versus Gnome?
>>
>> 4. Maybe a commercial software has more means (money) to lobby schools
>> into adopting it? Is this a fatal problem for the free software
>> competitor?
>>
>> --
>>
>> XIAO Gang (~{P$8U~})                          xiao@unice.fr
>>                http://pcmath126.unice.fr/xiao.html
>
>--
>Doug Loss                 Always do right.  This
>Data Network Coordinator  will gratify some people
>Bloomsburg University     and astonish the rest.
>dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain
>
>
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