We spend about $1.3 million dollars on technology each year. I just looked at the details concerning how that $1.3 is spent, and it seems pretty clear to me that a switch to open-source software plus some cuts in spending on computer labs would easily give us the resources to buy every student a netbook. (I draw the information from this budget report.).
Below I make the case for this proposal.
The Savings From Switching to Open Source (and Providing Laptops)
The chart below represents the yearly expenditures that could be cut to provide this netbook program.
| Yearly Expense | 80% of Yearly Expense | ||
| Lab Support | $25,000 | $20,000 | |
| Software Licenses | $210,000 | $168,000 | |
| Lab Upgrades | $160,000 | $128,000 | |
| Smart Classrooms | $60,000 | $48,000 | |
| TOTALS | $455,000 | $364,000 |
It looks like we spend $455,000 on software licenses, lab upgrades, and smart classrooms each year. Here’s an alternative way to spend that money: Switch to open source software, cut labs and smart classrooms and give every incoming freshman a netbook.
I’m assuming almost all of this money could be diverted to funding a netbook program. With netbooks we wouldn’t need computer labs, and we wouldn’t need nearly has many smartclassrooms. If every student has a laptop suddenly every room is a smart classroom. (EXAMPLES: With Google presentation, a professor can give all of the students the URL of a powerpoint presentation. As the professor clicks through the powerpoint slide the slides will change on each students’ netbook. If you want to show students websites, have them all go there. If you want students to watch video – have them watch it on their laptops.)
Let’s assume that some proprietary software, computer labs, and smart classrooms would still be necessary. Some programs (e.g. visual and art media) might still need proprietary operating systems and software. The library might still need a small lab. We’d probably still need print labs. We might need some smartclassrooms to show full length movies. However, we wouldn’t need anywhere near the amount that we currently spend. So, suppose we only cut 80% of our current software, lab, and smart classroom budget. That still gives us $364,000 to put toward giving every student a netbook.
TOTAL SAVINGS = $364,000
As we’ll see – this is plenty of money to provide every incoming freshman each year with laptops.
The Cost of Providing Every Student With a Laptop
With an enrolment of about 5,000, let’s assume we’ll buy about 1,250 netbooks each year. These could not be the original Asus eeePC. Those have 7-inch screens and crazy-small keyboards. We’d probably have to go with the laptops with 10″ that have sufficiently large keyboards to be full-blown laptop replacements. Examples of these are the Asus eeePC 1000, the MSI Wind U100, and the HP N270 notebook. The prices of these (with Windows) are around $300. By ditching the license for Windows and buying in bulk, I estimate that we could get these down to at least $250. And if netbooks keep coming down in price (or we could find a suitable 8.9″ netbook) we may be able to get these at around $200)
$200 a netbook = $250,000
(From our $364,000 figure we still have a $114,000 SURPLUS!)
$250 a netbook = $312,500
(From our $364,000 figure we still have a $42,000 SURPLUS!)
If we had to buy the netbooks at $300, we could increase every student’s current technology fee by about $10 and offset the cost. We’d have $50,000 extra dollars to spend. bringing our total to $414,000
$300 a netbook = $375,000
(From our $414,000 budget we’d still have a $40,000 surplus)
That said, I’m very optimistic that we could find suitable netbooks that didn’t run Windows for WELL under $300. That’s simply a worst-price scenario high estimate.
Benefits
Every Student Has a Laptop
That’s a pretty big one. That’s a huge personal benefit to each of our students. We would boast something that I think would be amazing, and here’s the kicker – we’d be saving the tax payer money. We could honestly say that we were providing every student with a laptop and spending less money on technology than other peer institutions.
Every room is a smart classroom
Not only can you do power point presentations through the netbooks, but you can do them in a way that’s better. You also can do many, many more cool innovative smart classroom things if every student has a laptop. If you don’t like smart classrooms, fine – tell your students not to bring their laptops. But if you’re all excited about technology in the classroom and want smart classrooms – you should love the idea of every students having a netbook that they can be expected to bring to class. I’ll blog more about this later.
Reduce Paper
Students can bring readings to class. Students can have your hand outs – but it can all be electronic
Broader Energy Savings
That’s $62,000 to $114,000 was just the tip of the iceberg. The current netbooks run about 4-12watts. A projector in a smart classroom would run around 250 watts. 30 students running 4 watt netbooks to view a powerpoint presentation would use 58% less power than your traditional smart classroom with a projector. 25 students running 10 watt netbooks would use about the same amount.
Furthermore, if every student has a netbook that will almost surely lead to fewer students bringing desktops to campus. And we all now how easy it is for students to leave their desktops running in their dorms when they’re not paying for electricity.
Finally, with fewer computer labs, you’d have fewer desktops sitting around idle all day. Plus any work a student does on the netbook in lieu of doing that work on a desktop in a computer lab would consume much less energy – bottom line – we don’t need monster computing machines for basic word processing and internet use.
Supporting the Open Source Community
If more academics understood what some of the main motivations were behind the open source community, I suspect many more of them would be behind it. Knowledge should be freely shared so that others may build upon it. Code should be treated like a form of knowledge that academics should want to be freely shared. This is something that I’ve already blogged about, so I won’t go into much more detail here.
Social Justice
Consider a commuter student that is somewhere near the poverty line. We charge them a $150 technology fee, and pump all of it in to campus resources that they may scarcely have a chance to use. Computer labs aren’t always open, and if the student works a couple of jobs and lives an hour a way – they may never really have a chance to use those labs. This proposal distributes one of the most important tech tools a student can have to every student.
Campus Image/Recruiting
This would be a HUGE recruiting tool. Every student on our campus would be given a laptop. Furthermore, in this hard economic climate, we would be saving money while (a) giving every student a laptop and (b) potentially turning every classroom into a dynamic smart classroom that can do way more than our current smart classrooms. So we would be able to boast enormous technological improvements for less money. (thanks to Dale Tuggy)
Potential Objections
What If A Student Wants To Buy Their Own Laptop
They get a credit in their senior year. Buy your own laptop. At any point before their senior year, they may opt in to the program and get a netbook and forgo the credit. If they do not opt into the program, they get some kind of credit during their senior year. The details of this aren’t worth fussing over – the point is – they get a credit at some point.
Netbooks Aren’t Good Enough
Yes they are. When the netbook craze really peaked last November, everyone was interested in the Asus eeePC that had only a 7-inch screen. That’s the model everyone has in mind, but there are many good 8.9″ and 10″ models out there with near full-size keyboards that would be sufficient laptop replacements. (e.g. MSI Wind u100, HP N270, Asus eeePC 1000)
What About Students/Programs That Might Need Proprietary Software
That’s why I only proposed taking 80% from the budget. The remaining 20% can be to fund proprietary labs that are essential to some aspect of some discipline.
Aren’t Laptops in the Classroom a Bad Thing?
Professors who didn’t want to have a smart classroom would be free to ban laptops in the classroom. Or they could adopt something like the laptop policy that I’ve adopted in my classes. Keep in mind, that the primary purpose of this program is not to get laptops in every classroom. It’s to have the potential for any professor to make their classroom a dynamic smart classroom if they want to, and to give the students a useful tool that they can use for their education outside of the classroom. If a student never takes a class that makes use of laptops in the classroom, we would still be benefiting the student. And it would be cheaper than the current system to provide that benefit.
What About the Cost of Switching To/Supporting Another Operating System.
Some of that won’t cost extra because we’d shift the labour put into maintaining labs and smart classrooms into supporting the system. Second, if we needed to hire specialists, or pay to train our current tech staff, we’d have money to do it based on the surplus savings.
What About the Cost of Supporting the Netbook Program
See above point.
The Switch to Open-Source is Scary
I’ve heard people say that the open-source movement isn’t mature enough for prime-time, and that it’s pretty risky to switch to something that isn’t yet fully matured. The open-source movement is likened to an untamed beast, and we can’t predict if it will be there to do what we want it to do. For example, some people are worried about support. What if we need help? Who will help us?
Response One:
Support is one of the main open-source business models! That’s how companies that support open-source make money. You can call people up who will help you. The nice thing about open-source is that there is a market for individuals to get into the support business by setting up blogs and writing about tips and posting patches to get whatever you’re using to do what you want to do.
I think it’s actually riskier in terms of support to use proprietary software. First, if you rely on Microsoft for support, they have greater control over how you get support for it. Since they get to control who can see and tweak the code of the software you’re using, they could force you to go through them or an approved support center. Second, if Microsoft decides that they’re no longer making enough money off of some piece of software, they can stop supporting it and you’re forced to move on to their next product that does what you want it to do – even if you were perfectly content with the old versions.
With open source software, if some company decides that they don’t want to support some piece of software and there is still a market to provide support anyone can give it to you. Some other company (or individual) can see the code of the software you’re using, some other company can step in and support the code – or you can hire freelance coders (much like you would hire an independent contractor) and pay them bounties to do what you would need. Bottomline: there are MORE (and BETTER) support options for open-source software.
Response Two:
I want to say one more thing to address the open-source fear-mongering that’s out there. Many, many governments and government agencies are switching to open-source in order to cut costs. Here is a nice list of examples. Our own government is making the switch. A Department of Defense study urged switching to open source software in 2006. Just this year they made the first steps toward making the switch! And now the current administration is seeing increased pressure to look other areas where the government could benefit from open source. Guess what…the Obama administration seems to seriously be looking into it.
That alone should alleviate concerns about technical support. The fact that government agencies and governments are making the switch create a HUGE market for support, and should put a bit of a stopper in what seems to be misplaced fear about open-source.
Long gone are the days when the open-source movement consisted of a few computer hackers with serious technical and coding know-how. It’s here. It’s on the cusp of going mainstream, and it’s not something we should be afraid of adopting. Even if you think there are some residual risks and potential costs, you must balance those against the benefits – and I just can’t see any potential concern (even if it is a legitimate concern) coming anywhere close to outweighing the potential benefits.
BOTTOMLINE:
As far as I can tell, buying students netbooks is cheaper, greener, and more responsive to social justice concerns than the meagre/expensive tech offerings that we currently provide our faculty, staff and students.
Wow, what an awesome proposal! Kudos on pulling this together and laying out the various objections and replies. It might not only inspire change at your university, but elsewhere as well.
There’s no doubt that it’s still a big change that I imagine many would be scared of. But you’re doing a lot to alleviate those worries.
Thanks Josh
Hi Andrew,
Interesting proposal. A thought:
Back when I was an undergradute, I remember having to help lots of people fix the personal PCs that they’d bought and subsequently broken. The university computers, in contrast, always worked fine because no student had the right priveleges to accidentally break anything, and university staff could do the regular maintenance on all of it quite easily. (I once heard that at York university, they have an automated system that reinstalled *everything* on *every* university computer every single night – remotely, of course. I don’t know if that’s the exact truth, but I imagine that a similar system must be in place at many universities.)
So I’m wondering if this could upset your proposal. Might you end up spending vastly more on helping students repair their laptops than you currently do on maintaining centralised PCs? I suppose one solution is to have students’ laptops linked up centrally in a similar manner. But clearly, this won’t help with hardware or networking issues. (What are you going to do, for instance, with a student who spills coffee on their laptop? Replace it, encouraging recklessness, or not bother, disadvatanging unlucky and poor students?)
Alex
Hi Alex,
That’s a very good question. Off the top of my head, here are a couple of options.
First, netbooks aren’t that expensive for a student to replace if they break one. The typical student pays $300-$400 a semester for books. That’s way more than a netbook (that theoretically should last four years). I think it’s easy to have the intuition that this requirement is burdensome on a student because we’re so used to the idea that laptops are ridiculously expensive. Netbooks aren’t.
Second, having a university requirement to have a laptop would free at least some poorer students to utilize certain sources of financial aid. Again, an option they would only have to avail themselves of – if they were unlucky.
Third, we’re not proposing the elimination of all computer labs. It would be more difficult for a student with a broken laptop to get access to a computer, but not impossible. This wouldn’t solve their problems if they were required to bring laptops to class. (See the next point for this issue)
Fourth, there could be a laptop borrowing program with a handful of netbooks to function as temporary replacements if a laptop was broken. Poor students who were (a.) unlucky, (b.) couldn’t use financial aid to obtain a replacement netbook, (c.) couldn’t get access to a lab could take advantage of that program, and (d.) needed a laptop for class – could set up an arrangement with the borrowing program. We could even give preference to students on financial aid.
This latter program would cost some money, but I think it would still be within the surplus. For example, it would only cost $20,000 to have 100 laptops just sitting around to be checked out by unlucky students, and we already have offices on campus that check out equipment to students, so there would be no additional cost there.
But I do acknowledge that there are more issues here to think about. Thanks for the comment.
This proposal is awesome, Andy. I think something like this would definitely benefit the school, and could, like you say, turn every class room into a smart classroom.
I think Alex Gregory brings up some good potential problems regarding support, however I think there are some good solutions.
1.) Currently, SUNY Fredonia has an on-campus group called ResNet, which fixes computers. I see no reason why this service could not also be used for the netbooks. This group hires students, so they could simply request that students have some knowledge of maintaining Linux, or they could offer training. I know a few students that currently work there, and they are familiar with Linux.
2.) A SUNY-wide support forum should also be established. In this forum, students could log in with their campus username/password, and could post about whatever problems they are experiencing. Other students (or people from ResNet) could login and post possible solutions to their problem. I think this is incredibly important, because this is what open source is all about. Plus, there are open source (free) forums that the SUNY system could use, so the only thing that would be required would be hosting the forum on a web server.
3.) I think the main concern would be making sure the students don’t lose notes/homework/projects which they save on their laptop. Since the main purpose of these netbooks would be to enhance the students education, I think even though a computer crash would be a pain, as long as their academic stuff is saved, everything is okay. There is an easy solution for this. The campus currently provides 150mb of storage on the network. This is plenty of room to store papers, homework, projects, etc. You could tell the students that in the case of an unrecoverable crash, everything will be lost except what is stored on the network server, and that all important information (papers, homework, etc.) should be stored on that server. Of course there will be students that will not follow this recommendation, but at least they were informed.