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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."
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.
Moodle (moodle.org) is great, but so is that other Free Software e-learning and course management web application Dokeos (dokeos.com). (A fork of ex-Claroline, by the original authors, who are no longer employed by the UCL who owns the trademark Claroline.)
Which one is the best, Moodle or Dokeos, ultimately comes down to personal preferences. In general Dokeos is more Blackboard-like, and I know several institutions who choose Dokeos because of the lower learning curve, having used Blackboard before.
Also worth noting is another free software package, a project funded by the (Mark) Shuttleworth Foundation: SchoolTool (schooltool.org), including SchoolBell. It's not an e-learning and course management web application, but rather a school infrastructure administration tool.
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!
I second the question. Serious omission not listing Moodle. I've used it in classes, as well as WebCt. I know other profs who've used Moodle, Blackboard, and WebCT.
Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT. The license to use WebCt runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.
Several comparisons of the main packages are available. Graf and List (2005) is an academic paper comparing nine different ones and is perhaps the most comprehensive. (2005 was a long time ago, in software time, so some of the comparisons might be different now.) They find that Moodle edges out the whole field.
At that point Sakai was just starting. Sakai is a well-funded effort at the Ivy League level to reinvent the wheel, which they're doing well, but at a licensing cost of thousands of dollars to universities. (Free to individuals, I believe.)
Munoz and Duzer (2005) at Cal State Univ. - Humboldt, compare Blackboard and Moodle, where Moodle also wins.
And for that matter, Ask Slashdot did a post on alternatives to Blackboard in 2005. Again, Moodle (and Blackboard) have come a long way since then, so comments may or may not be justified.
All the more recent, less formal evidence, suggests that Moodle has been pulling ahead, not falling behind.
http://moodle.org/ is a huge site with enough resources to drown a battleship. One of the interesting corners is a map showing where most of the thousands of moodle sites worldwide are located.
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)
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.
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