When faculty say 'NO' to UNIX/Linux
Well, sooner or later, it was bound to happen. We are in the process of retiring our last two instructional UNIX/Linux labs. And guess what? Nobody seems to care! In fact, the faculty who have been using those labs for instruction have asked us to give them Windows and Macintosh platforms instead! Here are three reasons why:
- Most specialized UNIX applications have now been ported to Windows or Macintosh.
- Software included with textbooks runs under Windows or Macintosh, not UNIX/Linux.
- Most GNU/Linux software can be run under Macintosh, and now under Vista.
Now don't get me wrong. We still have a major investment in UNIX and Linux in our machine room. And we have a small team dedicated to supporting UNIX and Linux for research in individual departments all over campus. Many departments even maintain their own IT staff for such local support. The School of Informatics even maintains a Linux lab for Computer Science students. But, for general purpose computing, and even for instructional computing outside of Computer Science, no one is interested in using UNIX or Linux.
It's easy for the geeks among us to argue that Linux is 'free' and 'easy' to support but most of us in the trenches know that TCO is hard to measure. It is easy to find oneself misled by the numbers. Put simply, there is no such thing as a 'free lunch' -- one way or another there are unanticipated costs associated with every solution and those costs tend to balance themselves out. Moreover, in an educational setting, TCO is not the only consideration. Our educational mission is (or should be) our overriding concern.
Further, the needs of a university environment are somewhat different than the needs of K-12. For instance, a library in a grade school setting needs little more than a high-speed connection to the Internet -- and maybe connection to an on-line card catalog. And, in a classroom setting, a grade school needs word processing, a spreadsheet application, and a presentation application. And not much else by way of instructional software. It simply doesn't matter what platform you choose in these settings -- as long as the platform selected is being used by those for whom it is provided.
In high-school, the landscape changes, as student interests become more diversified and educators start to turn to discipline-specific tools for instruction. Still, most personal productivity tools are available on any platform you might choose.
Even considering aggressive discounts for education from Apple and Microsoft, the 'free' component of GNU/Linux and OpenOffice is quite alluring. Add to that the deplorable state of funding of public education and administrators start to push solutions onto IT staff and on to educators which may be less than suitable. The end result is that the technology becomes severely underutilized. This under-utilization leads administrators to mistakenly believe that fewer funds are needed -- not more.
Few are as fortunate as Chris Dawson has been this year to have available to him the option of establishing a mixed computing environment which allows him to address a variety of needs with a variety of solutions while recognizing that some solutions may be more costly than others.
In a university environment, the picture is quite different. For the most part, our 'customers' are faculty and, along with faculty, we serve the student. Budgets, while not liberal by any means, are large enough to have discretionary dollars associated with them. And faculty have discretionary dollars to put toward meeting their own IT needs when our Education IT priorities are not the same as theirs.
Education IT needs to pay close attention to the instructional needs of our faculty. We need to understand how they are using their software and we need to provide the platforms they need to meet their instructional mission -- and the educational mission of the unviersity as a whole.
We need to be able to show them how the technology can serve them but then we need to let them decide which solutions best serve their needs.