The Open Source Movement

Molly Tipton failed at her first try last winter at putting classroom resources and homework assignments online—via a class MySpace page—after parents said they feared their children might get into trouble on the popular social- networking site.

But the 8th grade teacher has had more success this school year, with her second try. Last fall, she started using Moodle, an online course-management system that is stored on the El Paso,Texas, school district’s computer server, with access controlled by student passwords.

Through Moodle, Ms. Tipton now posts reading passages and links to Web sites that are related to her lessons. She also has set up a popular online chat room for her students and posts homework assignments online, a feature that students as well as some parents have embraced. Moodle’s online capabilities, she said, are making her social studies classes a hybrid between traditional and online courses.

Ms. Tipton is part of a growing number of K-12 educators in regular classrooms who are using course-management systems to share assignments, homework, classroom assessments, and other information with students and their parents. A course-management system is a software program that allows controlled exchanges via the Internet of just about any kind of information related to a course, although the features of individual products differ.

Moodle is perhaps the most popular rival to the course-management system sold by Blackboard Inc., the dominant company in the U.S. market for e-learning tools in higher education. The for-profit Washington-based company is trying to expand its foothold in what Blackboard officials call the emerging K-12 market.

Columbia University (www.columbia.edu) and Microsoft Corp. (www.microsoft.com) are collaborating on an initiative to digitize a large number of books from Columbia University Libraries (www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb) and to make them available to internet users. With the support of the Open Content Alliance (www.opencontentalliance.org), publicly available print materials in Columbia Libraries will be scanned, digitized, and indexed to make them readily accessible through Live Search Books (http://books.live.com).

Columbia University and Microsoft are partners in the Open Content Alliance, along with the Boston Library Consortium, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Toronto among others. The alliance, which has made open access a core component of its mission, is scanning only out-of-copyright materials.

Columbia University Libraries is playing a key role in book selection and in setting quality standards for the digitized materials. Microsoft will digitize selected portions of the libraries’ collections of American history, literature, and humanities works with the specific areas to be decided mutually by Microsoft and Columbia during the early phase of the project. Microsoft will give the library high-quality digital images of all the materials, allowing the library to provide worldwide access through its own digital library and to share the content with noncommercial academic initiatives and nonprofit organizations.

A new report from the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN) aims to introduce educators to Moodle, an open-source software program for managing courses online.

Educational institutions will increase spending on open source software and services over the next few years, but that doesn't mean proprietary software will be left in the dark, according to a new report covering 14 countries.

Market research company Datamonitor predicts that primary and secondary schools and universities will spend $489.9 million on open source software by 2012, up from $286.2 million now.

The figure is based on interviews with vendors and school officials in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, India, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Sweden, and Italy, said Justin Davidson, associate analyst at Datamonitor who covers education technology.

The spending estimate covers operating systems and learning management systems, such as software used to make Webcasts of lectures available online, plus maintenance and support.

The figure represents a small portion of the $9 billion overall educational IT spending by those countries, but shows growing interest.

"I don't think we expected it [the figure] to be so much," Davidson said. Beyond 2012, however, Datamonitor expects open source spending to flatten.

Educators said they're attracted to open source software since they feel they have more control over how applications are developed, Davidson said.

"Some institutions feel they will get a better return on their investment from open source software," he said.

Institutions were also aware that although the software licenses are free, maintenance and support can often make open source offerings just as expensive as proprietary programs, Davidson said.

A small minority of schools have opted for open source for "philosophical" reasons, such as a desire not to give their money to a commercial software company. However, most decisions to use open source were strategic, he said.

Other drivers for choosing open source are increasing government interest. Certain regions in India, as well as the French government, have encouraged schools to use open source software, especially operating systems, Davidson said.

Interest in open source software also seemed to be prompted by dissatisfaction expressed by some schools with Blackboard, a major provider of enterprise educational software and services, Davidson said.

In 2005, Blackboard bought WebCT, another educational software company, for $180 million. Blackboard's share of the market grew to more than 70 percent, Davidson said. Concerns remain within schools over the dominance of one company in the market, he said.

But Blackboard's software has an appeal for institutions with smaller budgets that can't fund developers to build their own open source applications, Davidson said.

It shows proprietary and open source software will complement each other, depending on the needs of the schools, Davidson said.

Elementary school teachers in Florida this fall will be the first in the nation to have access to a free, state-approved online reading program. State Education Commissioner Eric Smith last week officially adopted the program, called Free-Reading, state education department spokesman Tom Butler said Wednesday.

The move puts Free-Reading on an approved list of programs that schools can use as a supplement to conventional textbooks. While schools can access it for free, its developer, a Brooklyn-based start-up called Wireless Generation, hopes to profit by offering training and related materials for a fee.

If the program is successful, it could lead other states to experiment with "open source" materials that could save schools billions of dollars. U.S. schools last year spent $4.4 billion on textbooks, says Eduventures, an education research and consulting firm in Boston.

Florida is one of the top five textbook markets in the USA, so the move could lead to development of other free materials that might someday challenge the dominance of big educational publishers.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Nov. 28, 2007 - MIT President Susan Hockfield today announced the launch of a new Web site, Highlights for High School, that will provide resources to improve science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) instruction at the high school level.

The Web site builds on the success of MIT's revolutionary OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, launched in 2001 with the goal of making all MIT course materials available for free over the World Wide Web. It is designed to help inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists and to be a valuable tool for high school teachers.

"Strength in K-12 math and science will be increasingly important for America if the nation is to continue to lead in today's innovation economy," said MIT President Susan Hockfield. "Highlights for High School will provide students and teachers with innovative tools to supplement their math and science studies. We hope it will inspire students to reach beyond their required classwork to explore more advanced material and might also encourage them to pursue careers in science and engineering."

Highlights for High School features more than 2,600 video and audio clips, animations, lecture notes and assignments taken from actual MIT courses, and categorizes them to match the Advanced Placement physics, biology and calculus curricula. Demonstrations, simulations, animations and videos give educators engaging ways to present STEM concepts, while videos illustrate MIT's hands-on approach to the teaching of these subjects.

A K-2 teacher at Achievement First Bushwick Elementary Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., Deutsch, 28, has been using Free-Reading.net, a reading instruction program that allows him to download, copy and share lessons with colleagues.

He can visit the website and comment on what works and what doesn't. He can modify lessons to suit his students' needs and post the modifications online: Think of a cross between a first-grade reading workbook and Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia written and edited by users.

If Deutsch wants to see a lesson taught by someone who already has mastered it, he clicks on a YouTube video linked to the site and sees a short demo. "I find it's more teacher-friendly than a textbook," he says.

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.
The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.
Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

The goal of the Wikipedia project is to create free encyclopedias in all languages of the world. Anyone with Internet access is free to contribute by writing new articles and editing existing articles. Wikipedia started in January 2001, and currently offers more than eight million articles in 250 languages. The largest Wikipedia is in English, with more than two million articles; it's followed by the German and French editions, each of which contain more than half a million articles. Nine other language editions contain 100,000+ articles, and more than 100 other languages contain 1,000+ articles. Every month, new language editions launch. Wikipedia is entirely created and maintained by a community of active volunteers.

On November 1, 2007, the Wikimedia Foundation, the international nonprofit organization behind Wikipedia, announced that in only nine days, its annual fundraiser has generated donations from 10,000 people worldwide. The 10,000th donation came from a contributor in Finland , who donated 10 Euros at 8:58 UTC (4.58 ET). This is a symbolic milestone for the Foundation's fundraiser, which is running from October 22 to December 22, supporting the Wikipedia encyclopedia and the Foundation's other free-knowledge projects.

The vast majority of the Foundation's revenue comes from private individuals, with donations averaging approximately USD 25.

open access/open content/ open source

“A Blueprint for Big Broadband,” has been released by Educause,
a nonprofit association working to advance higher education
through the use of information technology. It says
the demand for bandwidth in the United States has accelerated
well beyond the capacity of current broadband networks,
a problem that has enormous implications for U.S. education.
“Big Broadband” refers to the report’s vision:
nationwide, open access to high-speed internet service.

We support the open content movement,
including the Open Content Alliance, and
copyleft and creative commons websites.

We recommend the use of open source software.
The major online website for this is sourceforge.net
Other excellent sources are The Open Disc,
Oregon State University Open Source Lab
and the Open Technologies Initiative