FLOSS for eLearning - UNESCO(IIPE) Community of Practice Wiki
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UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning (IIPE)
Community
Software Freedom Day - 10 September 2005
FAQs on FLOSS for e-learning
- What suggestions do you have for FLOSS to help non-technical people to collaborate? (From Virginia)
- How can FLOSS support educational environments in MERCOSUR countries here Latin America? (From Guenther)
- What FLOSS products are suitable for the general administration and management (student records, finance, inventory, timetabling, etc. etc) of large schools in developing countries? (From Ken Ross)
- Are there any case studies on FLOSS which can assist with policy development? (Claude)
- How do we manage/deal with the FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) regarding FLOSS? - In particular, what can we do to simplify the implementation of FLOSS in underprivileged and technologically underserved communities? (Wayne and Molly)
Suggested topics for discussion
Overall aim of the forum is to focus on topics that will facilitate and assist with the migration to FLOSS systems in education in realisation of Education for All. (From Tony)
- Information postings to keep abreast of what is happening worldwide (Tony)
- Water cooler discussions e.g., chit chats about anything and everything (Tony)
- Discussion of research topics in FLOSS for education. For example: Compare Hole in the Wall and the Digital Doorway - minimally invasive education - with the more structured and more formal approaches. Research on new technologies (e.g. semantic web), patterns of knowledge, pedagogy and mobile learning, and what about the realities in Africa for example (critical shortage of teachers, low literacy levels, aids, limited access, etc.) (Tony & Kim)
- Spaces where we can post our experiences from trying out FLOSS tools for learning (Tony)
- FLOSS and SocialSoftware (Wayne)
- What features do we still need to be part of every FLOSS LMS - in other words what use cases should we develop (Kim)
- What are the areas of overlap and mutual interest between this IIEP community of practice and the Free Knowledge Community concept? (Kim)
- Issues relating to learning objects, learning object repositories, metadata, and interoperability in FLOSS technologies (Kim and Paul)
- Discussions relating to FLOSS and the concept of a Virtual University (Buroshiva)
- What factors facilitate colleges and universities to migrate from using proprietary enterprise software to open source software? (Tony)
- What are the differences between the way an open source community develops and maintains the software used in colleges and universities and the way a company develops and maintains the software they sell to colleges and universities?
- Why do colleges and universities select certain open source software (enterprise)over other open source software?
- Can the list suggest a strategy for introducing open source into colleges and other institutions, in FPC's with little bandwidth and few computing resources (mainly or wholly MS-based). Should it, for example, be big bang or piecemeal and, if the latter, what should be the order of priorities? In particular what should come first, bearing in mind the need to show early results in terms of more people with skills and knowledge? Is it Moodle, for example? (Geoffrey)
- What are the minimum resources needed to plan and lead such a strategy for learning objects/tutorial? Could it be done, for example, by a part-time lecturer-equivalent, using learning objects from Net, supported by one or more volunteers? (Geoffrey)
- What do you think of a tiered approach for producing and distributing learning objects: (a) a few small centres with broad-band capacity, where teachers find , download, customize and try out (or organise trials of)learning objects, the best of which are collated on CD (b) CDs are distributed to learning units with capacity to use them and feed-back (c) extracts from the CDs are printed off for distribution to units with lesser computing capacity. (Geoffrey)
- What are the best ways of helping potential users find easily accessible learning objects, bearing in mind that they do not have time or other resources to scan repositories and test out the most promising? Does an answer lie in developing a dialogue between object producers and volunteer users? How best find out what local people want and need to know? (Geoffrey)
- Making FLOSS solutions/tools more interoperable, compatible, integratable, or simply work effectively/efficiently with commercial solutions (Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia, etc). Some would want to have the best of both worlds. (Zaid)
- What is the best strategy/approach in getting the best from both worlds, until FLOSS can provide the full range of solutions to compete fully with the most advanced commercial solutions (Centra, Macromedia Breeze, SumTotal?, etc)? (Zaid)
- Cost (or time) models/issues for implementing FLOSS, which include all types of cost in addition to maintenance and license issues (hardware, facilities, expertise, time, etc). Having a solution such as SumTotal? versus a suite of FLOSS solutions (in terms of cost and implementation time, etc) that might not be that integratable or interoperable, and addition perhaps not so many features, etc. (Zaid)
- What are the best ways to promote FLOSS and train people in the less developed countries with the expertise/skills required to implement FLOSS? Promoting FLOSS is not enough, because if the people don't have the range of expertise or skills required to implement it, it is certainly going to give FLOSS a bad taste when the implementation goes wrong. That bad taste will also fuel the believe in and love for commercial solutions (which the not so IT savvy will support to avoid all the hassles they experienced with FLOSS. Also, negative experiences spread faster of the net-worked world than good ones). (Zaid)
Things to do
- Production of concrete deliverables, for example tools inventory, tutorials, best studies on FOSS (From Tony)
- Production of an up-to-date and accurate FAQs on FLOSS for education (From Wayne)
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