Open-Source in Education - Links and Resources

• Introduction: Motivations to use computers to support teaching, Benefits of Multimedia enhanced learning, Evaluating the efficiency of the computer-based Learning.
• Engaging e-learning: Why, after years or rather unsuccessful use of the web for learning content publishing, educators should start to invest in web-aware desktop applications. Web-browsers excel at content presentation, not at content creation or manipulation.
• Learning Activities: Self-paced training, blended learning, simulations, quizzes, assessment, etc. Including link to reusable e-tivities online.
• Learning Objects: Learning Objects = content + interface + Metadata. Discussion of the use, coding of learning objects. List of links of learning object repositories.
• Delivery Environments: Information specific to some delivery environment, like web-browsers, webCT, PDAs, standalone applications. Includes a wiki-essay on using wikis to support teaching.
• An Open World: Open Source Software, Open Content, etc.
• Software and Tools: Software and tools useful to educators and academics.
• Coding and Programming: Information specific to some programming languages and information about techniques to solve specific problems (for instance, automatic graph drawing).
• XML specifications: Markup specifications for the encoding of web or learning material (IMS, SCORM, and many others).
• Ontologies: Ontologies, text classification, recommender systems, etc.
• Adding Media: Finding images, sound, videos, on the web. Creating multimedia content.
• Design: Principles of design, usability, accessibility, interface components, functionalities.
• Distribution: Licensing/copyright, Digital Rights Management
• Further Links and References: Resources specific to some types of learners (K12, University), specific to some learning topics, specific to some countries, etc.

Stuart Yeates notes the following in his EDUCAUSE Blogs:

There is a discussion on slashdot (a very high traffic technie news site) entitled: "An Open Source Alternative to Blackboard?" Many of the comments are of low information value, but there are also many with good links to various sites of one kind or another.

Slashdot is an extremely high-traffic site and thus may attract some commenters rarely heard from discussing developments we do not already know about, so it may be worth tracking that discussion.

The University of Cork open source resources for researchers site, run by Joseph Feller, contains many resources of interest to OS researchers, in the following areas:

research bibliography | advocacy sites | project repositories | news sites

Via Stephen Downes

Open Admin for Schools
Posted on school-discuss: "Open Admin for Schools is a freely available web based school administration program. It now includes an online gradebook, and allows parent viewing of attendance, report cards, and gradebook, if desired. This is being developed by both the Battlefords School Division and the North West Catholic School Division in Saskatchewan, Canada." Version 1.80 was released today

Open Forum Europe - Open Skills Initiative:

Don't know how I missed this before. Many thanks to stuart Yates from the UK OSSwatch who told me about it.

This looks a great initiative - there are a sereies of projects in europe looking to promote education and training in Open Source and i think agreement to adapt this frameowrk woudl provide a degree of coherence to these steps. Need to look at this in some detail. But what interests me even more is the way the framework has been designed to allow a common standard for education and professional development without forcing unessarily rigid stanadrisation of learning.

In Europe major effort is being expended into trying to develop a common framework for qualifications - effort which in my view is making little headway. this is largely because moves towards standardizing qualifications fails to recognise the diversity of contexts in which learning takes place and the different cultures which have not only shaped our education systems but also impact on the organisation of learning at work. Will come back to this in next few days....

"OpenForum Europe introduces a new OSS skills initiative "The OSCoP Competency Framework" a definition of the skills needed by IT Professionals to excel within the open source environment. It has been developed in conjunction with many of the major open source product providers (including HP, IBM, Novell, Sun, RedHat), and endorsed by independent organisations such as the LPI.

The Competency Framework is at an early stage of development and nows needs review and input from the OSS community before the next stage of drill down is undertaken. We therefore welcome your comments and suggestions on both the concepts behind and the current limited detail within the OSCoP Competency Framework.