Higher education sub-cultures and open source adoption

Successful adoption of new teaching and learning technologies in higher education requires the consensus of two sub-cultures, namely the technologist sub-culture and the academic sub-culture. This paper examines trends in adoption of open source software (OSS) for teaching and learning by comparing the results of a 2009 survey of 285 Chief Academic Officers and Chief Information Officers with the 2006 administration of the same survey. Results indicate that while the key drivers of OSS adoption continue to differ for the academic and technologist sub-cultures, both sub-cultures converge in deeming total cost of ownership as the most important metric for making a go/no go adoption decision.