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How Open Source Is Changing Education

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the apple-for-the-penguin dept.

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."

4 of 70 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Open Source? by L4m3rthanyou · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wikipedia can be unreliable, yes, and that's why students here are told not to use it directly. However, it's still an incredibly useful tool when used as a "launch pad" for finding other sources (via google or whatever else).

    --
    One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
  2. Re:Open Source? by mgiuca · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm puzzled. In what way is Google open source? Yes, there are some open elements, but...
    Google is a huge promoter and funder of open source software. But I agree, their core software is not, which is kinda hypocritical.

    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.
    Wikipedia is as open as anything possibly could be. (Short of them giving everyone root access on their web servers).
    • The software it runs on (MediaWiki) was written specifically for Wikipedia. It's open source and GPL. I use it for my personal and professional (education) uses all the time.
    • The other software on their web servers is Apache and MySQL. Both open source.
    • All text which gets placed on Wikipedia is automatically released under the GFDL, so the text is "open source" (or "open text") too. This means anyone is free to copy the text and use it, but they must continue to release under the GFDL, similar to the GPL.
    • Finally, it's open in the sense that anyone can edit it!
    Therefore I am baffled at this statement that Wikipedia is "not entirely truly open".
  3. Re: Wikipeida's success by Lobais · · Score: 5, Informative

    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?

  4. MIT's program is NOT open source by ciaran.mchale · · Score: 2, Informative
    MIT's Open CourseWare program is not "open source" in the sense that the free/libre/open-source software community understands the term. In particular, MIT's courses are made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license (http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Global/terms-of-use.htm ), which is not an open-source license.

    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.