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How Open Source Is Changing Education
ftblguy writes "MIT's Open CourseWare program provides a great example of how the open source movement is impacting education. The Online Education Database also lists Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, and Google (?) as some of the other open source in education success stories. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems, and online documents for educational purposes. Each success story has served as a springboard to create more open source successes."
It is great for inquiries.
Students and real journalists use it all the time.
The best education open-source software out there!
I'm puzzled. In what way is Google open source? Yes, there are some open elements, but...
And Wikipedia's success is far from proven, nor is it entirely truly open either. If anything the area where it fails the most is in Education, since the information it contains is unreliable.
If the story is about "Open Source in education success stories" and it does not even mention Moodle (http://moodle.org/), I won't hesitate to consider it worthless. Moodle is the biggest Open Source success in education. To be completely ignorant about it is to be ignorant about Open Source in education.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Thank you for posting this story!
I wasn't aware of the "Open Courseware Consortium" before this. My next few years will probably be spent exploring and learning/ relearning from this resource!
Not only will people in the workforce be able to even more easily explore and research areas of interest and value to them from home at night to help them further their developement, but kids of any age capable of using it and having a library card will be able to further themselves and prepare for college/SAT as far in advance as they are capable and whether or not they have a computer at home. Thus improving their ability to obtain grants and scholarships when the time comes.
This sort of thing seems as fundemental an accomplishment as the establishment of the Public Library. Lets make sure both remain, as there are those trying to revoke all funding for Public libraries.
I dont know how open source is it?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Yeah! Dang those evil communist programmers that program for FREE. I say we ban everyone from doing anything without charging someone for it.
c++;
There are plenty of free programs whose source code is not available.
That is what "open source" *means*: that the source code is available not merely the object code.
"programing for free" is also an irrelevant comment. For there are also plenty of programers working on open source projects who are paid, and sometimes very handsomely, indeed. And why not? Should programers, unlike people in other lines of work, drink water and eat carpet fluff?
Addison Wesley and the parent megacorporation Pearson Education is the Microsoft of education. This article is about the use of open standards in Higher Ed, but AW makes their bucks by selling content in a variety of non-interoperable standards that serves to confuse the marketplace. They're out to make a buck so they'll really sell you anything you want, in whatever format you want: you just have to DEMAND IT. I did and it worked. They've used technology as a way to lock their customers in (myself included) with a particular book. Wanna do the homework? Well, buy the book, give them your details and subscribe to their own variant of Black Board or some other tech product that may or may not work as advertised. E-Books? What are they?
I suppose that's my point. Addison Wesley has a MONOPOLY over college and university textbooks here in America. Now they're trying to sell this dumbed-down, very expensive kind of education content around the world and unbalance the education systems of many countries.
We need to SERIOUSLY think about the large educational publishers and how they use technology to enable lazy teachers and lock customers into particular products in much the same way that Microsoft uses Office and Windows. Wiley is no better. And hey, every semester is an AUTOMATIC UPGRADE CYCLE. Think about it.
And everything your teachers told you was true?
Just look at something like chemistry or physics, when you leave one school to go to a higher one they practically tell you to forget everything you've learned up until that point as it was not accurate.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
The Online Education Database also lists Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, and Google (?) as some of the other open source in education success stories
I would like to add my penis to the list. I've educated many girls with it, and it also has open sores, so I think it should be included.
People won't pay for services either:its too dam expensive
This comment will come as a complete surprise to Redhat, Novell, IBM, MySQL and the other Open Source companies who are doing a nice turnover with support contracts.
And you prefer ignorance?
I installed it at a students club with LTSP and I was very impressed with it, even more than with Ubuntu. I can't wait to see the 7.04 with ActiveDirectory integrated.
Another important contribution of Wikipedia has been to beat down MediaWiki as a pretty powerful program for educational uses, as well as inspire other wiki software.
Savvy teachers in wired schools are finding a lot of success with smaller classroom wikis. The students aren't generating "new" content, really, but are building a repository of what they've learned together. I've seen good examples of building history timelines or evolutionary hierarchies, or foreign-language dictionaries (each student adds some examples of a word in a sentence).
...but just like in college, you still shell out for the text books (unless you want to piece together all the information from other sources), have to track down old articles in scholarly journals for readings (something which is difficult without either already being a student at a university or having a topnotch library system) and get distracted (hopefully) by your social life. Sounds like university without the support structure, resources and on top of that not being able to ogle nubile young coeds.
I just don't understand how you are modded insightful when you fail to understand the differences between PEOPLE and ENTERPRISES.
yeah, enterprises will pay for support, people won't....
Whereas we "*nix" users are the athiests. :-)
America, Home of the Brave.
What's that got to do with it? You don't seriously think companies like Microsoft or Adobe are making their millions from individual purchases do you? The money is in enterprise and large scale deployments. It always has been this way and it always will be this way.
I guess I am replying to a person who thinks that an ellipses is a valid replacement for normal punctuation, so I shouldn't be all that surprised you don't understand something as simple as the IT market.
The Manhattan Virtual Classroom at http://manhattan.sf.net is a GPL'd Course Management System that's been available since 2002. Probably one of the simplest interfaces out there, and very stable and well documented.
there's a lot on university and open software on http://twoss.wordpress.com/
Ask yourself why it is impossible to sell software that is not a game (and even that is hard) to the end user then.
There is a difference between understanding the IT market and happily accepting the trend.
It was already difficult before 'open source' came in the balance.
I just say it is now 'impossible' because of how software is now perceived by the end users.
Well, I think Wikipeida's success is rather proven. Just look at the google trafic: http://www.google.com/trends?q=wikipedia
And the reliability studies show that Wikipedia is just about as reliable as Britannica: http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-5997332.html
Furthermore it puts light on the fact, that you always have to cross test your informations, no matter the source.
How can that not be success?
If it was difficult before and is now simply impossible, that's the market at work. It was clearly a bad business plan, and direct sales models clearly deserved to fail. You seem very bitter about this. Have you considered the possibility that you are a third rate developer whos time has come? Have you considered the exciting possibilities of a career with McDonalds? People will always want hamburgers.
While trying to think of alternatives to reducing text book costs, I remembered I had heard about a project spear headed by UGA and now, the University of Denver (http://globaltext.org/index.html). While this project is geared towards the developing world, in talking with Dr. Rick Watson, that is for two reasons: Their need is even greater than ours and with a focus on competing in the United States, it may provoke American publishing companies. It has been featured on Slashdot before.
Educational institutions would help to provide content. Interestingly, through the way the project works all involvement with the project will result in a two-way transference of knowledge. Those in the Global South who use the project will also contribute, thus encouraging a global perspective on the content. So while American's may be providing the initial content, as that content is used Americans will also be receiving new content to learn from as well. Students, will have new sources of knowledge that is without precedent.
About the Project:
The project has a $200,000 initial grant from the Jacobs Foundation (http://www.jacobsfoundation.org/). The project is also very active. The first prototype book was written by a graduate class at UGA on XML programming. Dr. Rick Watson served as Editor in Chief of the book. The project is trying to release 10 books this year, with the first two being on business fundamentals and Information Systems. The goal of the project is to provide textbooks that would be used in the first two years of undergraduate study. Although, Dr. Watson told me over the phone that any content is appreciated, even upper level. The books are written with customized wiki software (Wiki software was put in the spotlight by Wikipedia). Each chapter has an editor / contributor and each book has an Editor in Chief. Academics will serve as editors to ensure the content is "textbook quality". There is also plans to start a Journal to give academics who help in the project a venue to publish articles that focus on the content and the experience in distributed document communities.
Books will be translated into Arabic, Chinese and Spanish. Dr. Watson is going to Egypt in a couple weeks to talk to a University there about how they can help with translation into Arabic. He is also planning a trip to China to do the same. As part of the grant from the Jacobs Foundation, the Global Text Project has created an International Advisory Board as well as a Quality Assurance Board.
It might come in handy, but this claim is completely out there. It sounds like someone is tooting their own horn a little too loudly. That's like saying, my new search engine ${name here} will have great impact on how we do searching today.
Development notes at http://devscribbles.blogspot.com
What I'm picturing is this: Some benefactor, perhaps a national government somewhere, pays a group of programmers, artists and professors to produce an open source college course on (say) mechanics. On the DVD is an interactive textbook with hyperlinks for people who need further explanation, but there's also video of a series of lectures and demonstrations. Then there is an interactive element that simulates (albeit abstractly) the common lab experiments that are embedded in a 3D virtual environment and really responds to students' input. Finally, there would be many pactice problems that the program could grade and explain immediately. Step by step. Bayesian algorithms could diagnose students' problems and try to correct them.
We have the technology and the brainpower to do all this now, and if we did it, the education one would get from a disk like this would be better than today's typical online course. The point of it would be, of course, that this would be a supplement in a real course where you have access to a professor to ask questions, and hopefully even get some experience in a real lab. But I have no doubt that a well-designed inteactive DVD like this would by itself do an excellent job in teaching you the material. And once it was made, it would only need occasional updates. After all, mechanics doesn't change that much. Of course, interactive applications constantly get better, so these could be improved on each year, and any physics professor in the world could submit exercises. There would even be a mechanism for profs to merge in their own exercises and make a custom DVD just for their students, so long as they abided by the open source license.
But most importantly, owning this DVD would cost students $0.20, the cost of the media. They wouldn't have to wait until college to start learning from it. They wouldn't need to be near a university. They could go at their own pace. They could localize the material to their native language. If they don't have internet at home, they could ask their library to burn the DVD for them and pay them $1 for the media and labor. If they did have the internet, they could discuss the problems together on a volunteer-moderated discussion forum. That sounds to me like a whole lot of education for the price of one well-designed DVD. It's absolutely crucial that this be open source. Sure these things would sell, but then they'd just be one textbook among others. Only if they were arbitrarily tradable, burnable and alterable would they become the gold standard, and then volunteers would make them awesome. That's not to say that whoever made them would have to be poor. There could be some sort of a foundation that might sell extra services, provide paid support ot universities, etc. This thing might not need public funding at all, just a big initial investment. (Of course it wouldn't be just one course...). And don't underestimate the willingness of competent volunteers to help with this. I can tell you I work my ass off to publish journal articles for the benefit of my fellow researchers, and I get paid nothing (except prestige). I've also reviewed articles for journals. Again, I got paid nothing for this. In academics, high-level volunteer work is par for the course. I think it would be a pretty desireable line on a vita that you were invited by the responsible foundation to serve as an editor and review contributions for the (say) interactive history of WWI DVD course. If this were as big as I'm sure it would be, top profs would be fighting to volunteer, including me (though I'm no top prof).
So because I can picture very easily this sort of thing, and I don't see it happening, I think that open source is failing in education. What's succeeding right now are agressive book publishers that keep pimping glossy desk copies of their textbooks without telling me that for a crappy b/w paperback, my students will pay $90. That's seriously fucked up. Education is crying out for open source!
Fairly important to be aware that Moodle is GPL, written in PHP and mainly uses PHP but also can use Postgresql. I have used both Blackboard and Moodle and even discounting the significant price difference (grins), I much much prefer Moodle.
You don't know me but assumes I live from selling software...funny....
No I don't, I am in consulting because I know sales of software was doomed for the developper in the consummer market the very first day I put my first pirated game in my brand new C64.
I still think it is sad that the producer of something cannot decide how its work will be exploited just because it is not physical...
And I am not even talking about copyright or anything else.
Just:you don't want to pay, then don't use my work....
No-one's mentioned it yet, but most of the successes here, can be used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project as well. When free textbooks are written by students, they can be shared, and OLPC will have the infrastructure to do the sharing.
What's needed is a slashdot or google style moderation system so that the best percolates to the top and replaces the not so good. Meta-wiki anyone?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Parent is correct. And as a man known for his Wikipedia-esque intelligence once said, "You forgot about Poland!"
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
See my sig for a catalog of free books (books that have intentionally been set free by their authors, not old public domain ones like Project Gutenberg collects). Some professors at MIT write textbooks and put them up for free on their OCW pages, which is great. However, I've noticed that a lot of these tend to evaporate quickly. I have a feature in my catalog's web interface where users can click on a button to report that a link is broken. A lot of the time when this happens, I find that it was a link to an OCW page, which has disappeared, and google searching doesn't show the book existing at any new home, either. Maybe that professor didn't get tenure, and left, or maybe he got a publishing contract, and his publisher wouldn't let him keep the book on the web for free. As with software, this is always a concern with any book that isn't under a copyleft license; it can become unfree at any time. In general, I like the spirit of OCW, but I think it gets hyped waaay out of proportion to what it actually is. Having access to a professor's web page isn't unusual; it's the norm. And having access to professors' web pages isn't the same as getting a free college education.
Find free books.
Do you only squat-on and post-to "/.", and who financially donates to your living standard.
... on "/.".
/., 2600, Wired, Technology Review, San Jose Mercury a/o ... would not consider your questions as having the intent to fain ignorance with obvious prevarication to obfuscate a disingenuous self-serving marketeer (musketeer like) agenda to churn-turn serious discussion away from this topic/subject.
... are having a significant impact on education, business, global markets, governments ....
Over the past year alone there has been many postings of articles, comments, and URL/Links related to Wikipedia, Google, Novel, Edu content and resources, OSS developers
I am perplexed that anyone who keeps up with current technology events on
The facts are FSF/GPL/GNU, Linux, OSS, Open Standards, Open Content, Open Courseware, Open Knowledge Initiative, Open Biz-Models, Open Market Architecture, Open Government
MicroSoft (MS) is big and strong, but their growth is limited in this new vibrant and developing Open-World-Market. MS needs to open up or in another 20 to 30 years they will close up, just like many others corporations in the past that forgot to be inclusive and behaved as exclusive from new disruptive market dynamics.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Hoi,
Given that Citizendium is not available for public viewing, it is inappropriate to list it as a relevant resource. When it gets its first public airing, there will be only some 1000 articles. This is hardly going to make an effect. There are many other public wikis that provide a resource that is certainly more relevant at this time for education; Wikieducator comes to mind.
The only thing that we have heard from Dr Sanger is his insistence that it is going to do better.
Thanks,
GerardM
E-learning' is teaching and learning that are delivered, supported, and enhanced through the use of digital technologies and media. People often conufse with mere downloading of materials to e-learning. Moodle, Sakai are plaforms use to prepare and deliver these materials. But most of the MIT OCW material is mere 'downloadable' materials. It has it's own value, but it's not truly a e-learning. Please see some useful links given below.e mentSystems.ppt
http://tel.cedt.iisc.ernet.in/moodle/mod/resource/ index.php?id=1
http://sashikumar.n.googlepages.com/LearningManag
The power to free the knowledge of the world is within the people. The Open Source movement has shown us the way. People just have to do it. We already have a good start with wiki and for more technical stuff we have a more author centric model, but still under the gnu fdl
PlanetMath, http://planetmath.org/
PlanetPhysics, http://planetphysics.org/
To put this in practical terms, most of MIT's courseware is written using, say, PowerPoint and a word processor. MIT does not make the "source" (PowerPoint and wordprocessor) files available for download. Instead, MIT makes the courseware available in PDF format, which means that you can use the courseware material "as is" but cannot modify it. Also, the license forbids you from making money from the courseware. The inability to modify the "source" and the inability to commercially exploit the courseware mean that it is not open source.
I am not saying that what MIT is doing is bad; far from it. I just want to point out that, despite the impression given by the title of MIT's program, it is not open source.
That's exactly the point: it's only as accurate (and as complete) as the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The Encyclopedia Britannica should never be cited in real research; neither should Wikipedia.
Le français vous intéresse?
I'm kind of pissed at the flack people give us students for using Wikipedia. Right now, I'm taking a class on game programming. On every lecture's slides, he sources wikipedia.org. Thanks; I like paying $500 to read (poorly) regurgitated wikipedia articles.
MIT's OpenCourseWare has been amazing for myself.
Having taken a few courses on philosophy, poitics and western literature, I have learnt as much (or more) than I have been in my concurrently enrolled university lectures.
Having chosen to do law and commerce didn't do much for my love of philosophy, so I decided to, (rather than a triple-degree) study a few philosophy courses on OpenCourseWare in my spare time.
I find out, when talking to a friend of mine who did philosophy, that some of the courses are so similar (in the case of one in particular - even sharing prescribed readings and similar class topics) that I am glad I didn't waste more time and more money when I can learn the same thing for free!
I have yet to try the business courses offered there, but could this be another reason of entrepreneurs to condemn the MBA?
My Mommy says smoking kills. Oh, is your Mommy a doctor? No. A scientific researcher of some kind? No. Well then sh
Just junk food for thought...
Yeah, but how reliable is that reliability study? I mean, c'mon, news.com.com? Their domain name doesn't even make sense, and we're supposed to trust their data?
;-)
Interesting comment, considering that you posted it on a site called "slashdot.org".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.