Developing a guide for adopting Gibbon - Please share your feedback!

General
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Hello Gibbon community!

As part of a university course, I’m planning to develop a guide to help schools get up and running with Gibbon. More than a technical document, this guide would aim to help address organizational issues and the human-side of introducing a new piece of technology, as well as answering questions like: why open source, what does it mean, and who does it affect. This guide would include sections on needs assessment, creating a narrative for change, involving stakeholders in the process, and developing support strategies. It would also include a starter guide for helping establish a team of people who will handle the technical aspects of setting up Gibbon.

I could naively develop the whole thing based on my own experiences from the three schools I’ve personally setup, but to make a truly useful document I’d love to have some input and feedback from our community. To begin with, if you’d be interested in sharing some of your own experiences getting up and running with Gibbon, it would help me frame the design phase of this guide.

As this is part of a project for my university degree, I’d like to share a consent form with you, that covers your privacy and how your answers might be used. Please click here to read the consent form, and understand that submitting your response constitutes consent to use your feedback to help design this guide. All responses will be generalized and anonymous in the final document, but since this is a public forum, if there’s any thoughts or experiences that you’d like to share privately please email sandra@gibbonedu.org

Some questions to consider if you’d like to share your thoughts:

  • Why did your school choose to go with an open source solution?
  • Did you encounter resistance in choosing open source over a paid solution? If so, what were the concerns?
  • What strategies did you find effective in planning and managing setting up Gibbon?
  • At what rate did teachers and students begin adopting the system? Was there resistance to learning to use a new platform?

These questions may help get you started, feel free to share any experiences that you feel could help other schools as they plan to adopt Gibbon. You are also welcome to email your responses directly to sandra@gibbonedu.org

Thanks!

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  • Why did your school choose to go with an open source solution?
    After reading about gibbon, ie perfect (but now i have problems starting please see here - https://ask.gibbonedu.org/discussion/2963/please-help-start)
  • Did you encounter resistance in choosing open source over a paid solution? If so, what were the concerns?
    No, we choose opensource because we can’t afforth a payed solution, also a payed solution is not complete, and the ask money for every module.
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  • Why did your school choose to go with an open source solution?
    We needed the option for optimization. Our need can change everyday so open source was the best solution for us.

  • Did you encounter resistance in choosing open source over a paid solution? If so, what were the concerns?
    One concern was how polished this program is. But in the end it was worth the risk.

  • What strategies did you find effective in planning and managing setting up Gibbon?
    Learning and understanding gibbon before changing anything

  • At what rate did teachers and students begin adopting the system? Was there resistance to learning to use a new platform?
    We activated modules step by step. First of all we started with our libary and then more and more. Gibbon can be quite overwhelming with its contents.

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Thank you @ub123 for your feedback, it’s great to hear your school’s perspective :smiley: You’ve mentioned learning and understanding Gibbon was an important first step, I wonder, do you recall how much time you had between first testing out Gibbon and when you first started using it on a live server with your school?

Thanks!

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Hello Sandra,

we had round about 3 months of testing. We spend 4 more months with translating, coding und optimization.

Now we are live with just 7 months of preparation! Thats awesome :slight_smile:
Our teachers are still learning, but it’s getting better week by week.

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Hi Sandra, I would be love to even get your “working” documents. Something like that is very helpful for Schools like ours where resources are limited. Trying to convice the board and persuade teachers to use them, a document like that would be a treasure at least for me.

I am interested to know how have you been able to involve stakeholders, at which stage. Also the need for support, do you hire freelancer or full-time in-house support once Live.

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Thanks Calvin for your kind words! I will absolutely share what I have once it’s in some kind of shape to share, likely in a couple weeks :smiley: It will certainly be a living document once created, and hopefully over time we can collect feedback and add ideas from the collective experience of our community.

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HI @ross ,

I will be glad to share my feedback also. Have you any link to share this . I mean google forms?

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Hi Ghulam, your feedback would be much appreciated! I don’t have a google form, as I didn’t necessarily want to limit any feedback into the constraints of a survey. Please do feel free to email any ideas or thoughts you’d like to share that could be useful for the guide: sandra@gibbonedu.org

Thanks! :smiley: