OSS and Open Source

Given the abundance of open education initiatives that aim to make educational assets freely available online, the time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education. Despite the diversity of tools and resources already available—from well-packaged course materials to simple games, for students, self-learners, faculty, and educational institutions—we have yet to take full advantage of shared knowledge about how these are being used, what local innovations are emerging, and how to learn from and build on the experiences of others. Opening Up Education argues that we must develop not only the technical capability but also the intellectual capacity for transforming tacit pedagogical knowledge into commonly usable and visible knowledge: by providing incentives for faculty to use (and contribute to) open education goods, and by looking beyond institutional boundaries to connect a variety of settings and open source entrepreneurs.

Open-source software for course management poses market challenge.

Adopting an open source learning management system combined benefits and challenges, with lessons for change management.

Academia has adopted open source software for some online learning initiatives because it addresses persistent technical challenges

Emerging technologies for higher educational delivery has provided integrated software applications that have the ability to support both instructors and students.  The effect of these technologies is the result of increase students enrollment in most institutions in developed countries as the emphasis on educational delivery has shifted from the traditional classroom face-to-face to more blended learning.  Faced with the challenge of high enrolment, institutions and organizations in developed economies have been working on strategic plans to implement online education (Kim & Bonk, 2006).  In the case of higher institutions in Ghana, though some infrastructure has been built, these have not been fully integrated to support collaboration, assessment, feedback, students learning and lecture preparation and presentation.  Analysing the influence of technology in developing countries, the future of higher educational delivery in the next 10 years would be the use of Course Management Systems (CMS) which is currently driving the educational delivery of most institutions in the developed countries, creating a digital divide.  It is therefore crucial to identify factors that w

Begun in 1990, the Campus Computing Project is the largest continuing study of the role of computing, e-learning, and information technology in American higher education. The session will present the results of the 2007 Campus Computing Survey, including new data on P2P policies, open source deployment, IT security issues, strategic and financial planning for IT, instructional integration of IT, campus IT standards, course management systems, and Web site services.

Learn how Indiana University has successfully implemented the world's largest installation of the Sakai open source collaborative learning environment on eight campuses statewide. This presentation will cover migration from an enterprise legacy system, tiered support model, virtualized hardware solutions, source code management techniques, and balancing local needs with community-driven development.

The Fluid Project is an international community of academic institutions, community source software projects and corporations working together to address the precarious values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects.

Fluid combines both design and technology to create a living library of sharable user interface components that can be reused across community source projects. These components are built specifically to support flexibility and customization while maintaining a high standard of design quality. The Fluid framework will enable designers and developers to build user interfaces that can more readily accommodate the diverse personal and institutional needs found within community source projects.

Fluid will encourage user-centered design practices within community source software. To this end, we are creating a designer's toolkit that will offer useful design, accessibility, and usability strategies and documentation. Members of the Fluid team are available to provide usability and accessibility support within the Sakai, uPortal, Kuali Student, and Moodle communities.

Claremont McKenna College aims to migrate hundreds of courses and over 150 active instructors from WebCT to Sakai within a year. Whitman College has successfully completed its yearlong pilot and conversion from Blackboard to Sakai. Both schools have worked closely with faculty volunteers and have developed tools to address technical migration issues. The schools will share the different stages of their implementations, methods used, challenges, and successes.