This is a little outside the scope of OS - but I do think that without Open Source options we could not have tried some of the things we have done. I could hypothesise here a bit: larger institutions tend to buy commercial locked down stuff - these places tend to need locked down learning environments and freedom is a bit restricted - these then go together, and commercial environments tend not to support self directed personal learning trajectories to the same extent since their main market doesn't want this. This is in contrast to being able to think up something and try it quite quickly.
Derek W works down the road a CORE-Ed. He came into our course that is just finishing as a guest for three weeks looking at some of these questions, and we finished up each week with a course teleconference.
Derek (W) and I had a chat yesterday as a bit of a debrief to see where to go from here. His blog posts are very special. Watch for another one soon on PLE's - Personal Learning Environment's. :-)
Regarding more about our course - I have posted an overview somewhere here earlier this year in another discussion, but I cannot find it at the moment. I'll be back later.
-D