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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."
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.
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.
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
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?
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!
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.
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