Forgive me, a long post I’m afraid, but I don’t get the opportunity to reply on this list to something I know a little about. I could have just sent this to Henny, but hopefully it will be of interest to others. The Learning Technology group at the University of Wales College of Medicine (UWCM) has been developing with Zope since early 1999. I work with Phil Harris the principal Zope aficionado amongst us. I sit between him and the rest of the College. So, I know less about Zope and more about the organisational / educational issues. We're in exactly the same position as yourself Henny. We've been fighting the battle for quite some time. However, I don't believe the basic argument/philosophy is tied up with any specific technology as such. There are two parts to your case - first, why you should design and develop in-house as opposed to acquiring an off-the-shelf (commercial) solution?; second, why you should use Zope as opposed to any other technology? – my contribution is more on the former. Senior management – and most educators for that matter – still have a poor understanding of the potential role of technology in education. This is even worse when considering the complexities of delivering an all embracing online learning environment. A much more holistic strategic view is required that recognises the emergent functions and facilities of integrating across all institutional information systems – library, administration, web site, and learning/teaching technologies. Somehow this has to be communicated to senior management, and that it will only be realised by developing in-house. An off-the-shelf product is unlikely to provide a good fit and will require an organisation to change – similar to the arguments over CMSs. The case for designing and developing in-house is clear if the significance of coupling educational theory with technology development is recognised. Technology is not the problem, as Phil is fond of saying - *anything can be done it's just a matter of time* - that bit is under our control. People are the challenge - politics and change management are the real issues - in this respect evolution is better than revolution. But the impetus has ultimately got to be from the top down – senior management must drive it forward. A key part of the problem is that there is still poor understanding of what constitutes a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or Managed Learning Environment (MLE), or what it should do. The majority of commercial (and academic) offerings provide little more than packaged CMS/Groupware solutions. Although these are necessary pre-requisites to building an online environment for learning, there’s not much inherently in CMS/Groupware that directly promotes learning – they just provide some of the tools.

From senior management’s perspective, the commercial option provides immediate gratification. Many organisations are feeling the pressure to *be seen to be doing*. By buying into a recognised brand, e.g., Blackboard or WebCT, the VLE/MLE requirement can be ticked off the list – the question is, what then?

A home grown approach probably won’t initially deliver as much, or as quickly – but it is more likely to tackle real needs. More attention should be given to longer term strategic planning, perhaps with emphasis on producing something that is distinctive and which sets the institution apart from those that are buying the commercial offerings. Management, for some reason, judge an in-house approach as being more risky than a commercial solution. Which is a little strange, given how competitive and volatile the market is in this area. There are no guarantees that any of these companies will be around in 3-5 years. We are already witnessing mergers and odd alliances between companies, e.g., SCT, Campus Pipeline and WebCT. There’s a much greater chance of long-term viability if open source and open standards are adopted – the problem is communicating this to senior management who haven’t a clue about what this means! In our experience only concrete examples seem to have any impact. They need to see examples that are relevant and meaningful to their needs. An in-house approach does mean reliance on technical specialists. But this is no different to other areas of the organisation, e.g., network infrastructure and administrative systems. It is a false belief that there is greater dependence on technical experts for in-house development – this ignores the fact that specialist maintenance/support will be required for any kind of solution (commercial or not). Labour costs probably don’t work out much different either way. Commercial companies can only afford to engineer a common denominator – they have to try and keep all their customers satisfied. Tailored development to meet specific needs will only be done on a consultancy basis. The turn-around time for innovation will be much quicker if done in-house. Long term consultancy will prove costly (why not invest this internally?). Dangerously, institutions who go down this route will become increasingly dependent on the third party for what is their principal business - *education*. In addition, will there be an easy get out which allows transfer to alternative solution? Innovation in learning technologies is more likely to occur when technologists work day-to-day with learners and teachers in real settings. You’re also more likely to build something that meets the needs of your institution. Whatever solution is chosen – establishing OWNERSHIP and CONTROL is crucial! i.e., complete access to source and the freedom to do what you want with it. But this won’t be any good unless development is driven by educational need – and that depends on having teams of technologist working with educators – In my opinion, that should be THE strong argument for in-house development. Another advantage of the in-house approach is that the basic CMS/Groupware functionality is just as applicable to research and administration. Much of what is engineered for educational purposes is applicable elsewhere in the organisation – there must be cost savings there somewhere! That’s where we’ ve directed much of our initial development effort - producing generic and transferable solutions, e.g., MS Word document upload and on-the-fly conversion to XML then HTML/PDF – We thought management/administration would jump up and down over this, but they’ve been slow to capitalise on it. More eyes might light up when its combined with a through-the-browser XML editor. After working with Zope for over 2 years, we are more than convinced it is the design/development environment of choice – we’re not saying it will necessarily be that way forever. But at least it also gives us the ability to move on if it should ever happen – but I don’t think we will need to somehow :-) There are others on this list who can better rehearse the technical arguments for using Zope as opposed to any other development environment – it’s also well document elsewhere on Zope.org. Personally, I don’t believe any of the current VLE/MLE products will come anywhere near to what will ultimately be achieved through Zope. We’ve only just begun to scratch it’s potential in terms of modelling the relationships between people, resources, tools and events – there are amazing possibilities. As far as online learning environments are concerned - we feel the focus is shifting from a centralised institutional model to more individualised information environments, which are personal, private, and highly configurable – These will be used by people to support their learning, research, management, teaching, and many other aspects of their lives – what ’s more, individuals will have ownership and control of the technology as well as the content. Open standards, open source - Zope coupled with XML and XML-RPC/SOAP is going to be very special! Cheers, Joe Nicholls.