[TOS] What's Wrong With the American University System

[William Cohen]

On 08/01/2010 07:41 PM, Luis Ibanez wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Matthew Jadud <mjadud at allegheny.edu <mailto:mjadud at allegheny.edu>> wrote:
> 
>     2010/8/1 Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com <mailto:luis.ibanez at kitware.com>>:
>     > http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/whats-wrong-with-the-american-university-system/60458/
>     >
>     > http://highereducationquestionmark.com/
> 
>     I encountered this recently. I haven't read the book. Until I do, the
>     pull quotes only look to be great flame bait.
> 
>     What, exactly, is your point?
> 
>     Cheers,
>     Matt
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Matt,
> 
> The point is quite simple:
> 
> Many of the difficulties that the TOS community is facing when
> bringing Open Source to Higher Education institutions, are
> actually related to the fact that the HE system itself has a
> significant number of structural deficiencies.
> 
> 
> The most notable of which is :
> 
>        That professors in many Universities do not get
> evaluated nor recognized for their teaching activities,
> but mostly by they research activities and/or their ability
> for raising funds (e.g. grants).
> 
> The Corollary is that TOS activities may find a more
> receptive environment in HE institutions that are actually
> focused on teaching more than they are on doing
> research. (for example: Community Colleges)
> 
> 
> In Institutions that really have Education as a Mission,
> it is a nobrainer that open source software is the ideal
> vehicle for training students who really need to know
> how things work.
> 
> 
>      Luis

Hi Luis,

Rather than pitting researching against teaching would it better to get the research-oriented professors to the point where open source software is the preferred way of implementing their research? Help the research-oriented professors embrace open source software and make them advocates of teaching open source software.

There are many researchers that use open source software as a starting point for their research projects and they certainly see the benefit to using open source software. However, the main objective for those research projects is to produce publishable results, not to produce a polished piece of software. The result is they often end up with a set of patches that never make it into the upstream version of the software. There are benefits for researchers following the complete open source development model and getting their implementation ideas into the upstream open source software: upstream reviews can improve the quality of the research results, merging their patches upstream reduces future maintenance costs, and the software can be a portfolio showcasing their work for future funding.

-Will