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."

Comments

Open Source?

[owlnation]

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.

Where's Moodle?

[Flambergius]

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.

Re:Where's Moodle?

[Flambergius]

Moodle is used by around 21000 organizations (URL:http://moodle.org/stats) while Dokeos main page reports "over 1000". Number of users (students or organizations) is of course not an clear indicator of how good the systems are, but it most definitely is the indicator of success.

There are many worthy Open Source tools and systems for education. Some of them probably technically better than Moodle (I work with Moodle daily), but in terms of success I don't know anything that can be mentioned in the same sentience. For example, the much heralded Sakai is used by some tens organizations ("over 70" according to the Sakai Wikipedia page).

Some of my favorites:
Elgg, http://www.elgg.org/
LAMS, http://www.lamsinternational.com/
DSpace, http://www.dspace.org/

Btw, I fail to see how my original post merits a Flamebait, Score: 0. Its strongly worded, sure, but it is my honest assessment of the article linked to. The assessment is based on a single issue, I'll grant even that, but it is still correct. If you don't know enough about Open Source in education to know to include Moodle into your list of successes in that field then you don't know enough to write an article about Open Source in education.

Thank You!

[7bit]

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.

Re:No change at all but one.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.