How the Open Source Movement Has Changed Education: 10 Success Stories

Staff Writers — March 1, 2007

How would you like to study at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
for free? It has been nearly six years since MIT first announced their MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) program.
More recently, MIT announced that the OCW program, a free and
open educational resource (OER) for educators, students, and self-learners around
the world, is online and will be completed by 2008. The OCW provides open access
to course materials for up to 1,550 MIT courses, representing 34 departments, including psychology colleges and bsn colleges and all five MIT schools. The goal is to include materials from all MIT courses
by next year.

MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed
below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges,
organizations, instructors, online accredited colleges, and prospective
students use software, operating systems
and online documents for educational purposes. And, in most
cases, each success story also has served as a springboard to create more open
source projects.

Colleges

  1. Massachusetts Institute
    of Technology (MIT)    : MIT is the success story in this category,
    as this college started the intiative that pulled many colleges from all over
    the world into the OER initiative. In 1999, Provost Robert A. Brown asked a committee
    of MIT faculty, students, and administrators to provide strategic guidance
    on how MIT could advance knowledge and education to students in science, technology,
    and other scholarship areas. This mission was to literally fulfill
    MIT’s mission statement about how to best serve “the
    nation and the world in the 21st century    .”

Based on that premise, MIT’s OCW began to provide users with open access to
class syllabi, lecture notes, course calendars, problem sets and solutions, exams,
reading lists, and even a selection of video lectures in 2003. Eleven other
U.S. colleges plan to follow MIT’s example, and six of those 12 colleges
have offered an online presence or online colleges, (other than MIT):

It would be important to note that the colleges that offer OCW courses are
not meant to serve as “distance learning” initiatives. Credits and degrees are
not offered through access to open sources and participants don’t have access
to university faculty with these resources.

Organizations

  1. OpenCourseWare
    Consortium    : The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a by-product of
    MIT’s OER initiative, and its rate of growth makes this a clear success in
    the educational field. This group now includes members from 16 countries,
    not including the 14 additional affiliate organizations in its fold.
    Of these, China is the largest participant with 30 colleges that are active
    in OpenCourseWare Consortium programs under the organizational group CORE
    (China Open Resources for Education).

Other groups have also climbed on the open source bandwagon, and some corporations
have seen benefits in bringing open source products and services to the arena.
Sun
Microsystems, Inc.’s offering, Global
Education and Learning Community (GELC), now serves as a nonprofit organization
that provides an online portal for teachers to share resources and knowledge
that would otherwise go undiscovered. Other organizations include (but aren’t
limited to):

Online Encyclopedias

  1. Wikipedia: Wikipedia is the clear success story here, despite
    the recent row     created by user editing. Nothing could be more open than
    this user-generated online encyclopedia that allows users to modify its contents.
    With that said, while many universities point to Wikipedia as a starting resource
    for some projects, few
    professors will accept a citation     from this site. And, The
    Wikipedia Foundation agrees    .

Despite its reputation as an unreliable source, Wikipedia has branched off
into various translations and even into other areas like its Wikiversity,
a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities.
Wikipedia’s venture also has forged the way for other ventures. The following
initiatives validate this Web site’s importance, even with a new beginning by
Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, that will be monitored and edited by registered
users:

  • Citizendium
    - Sanger’s experimental new wiki project.
  • Stanford
    Encyclopedia of Philosophy     (SEP) – Stanford University’s highly monitored
    source that meets academic standards and that can be used for citations.
  • Connexions – A Rice University
    initiative, Connexions is more than an encyclopedia in that approaches learning
    in modules (a non-linear approach) that develop into courses. This resource
    is so free with its content that it even offers to share
    its technology    .

Online Collections

Online collections, whether specific or general, have enriched educational
experiences for anyone with Internet access. Some sites charge for access to
their collections, like Picture
History. Some sites charge for some services like copying and research,
yet offer open digital access to a variety of materials (like The
Library of Virginia). In this category, the student is safe to use most
of these resources as a citable source, as these collections contain many primary
source materials. But, just like any brick-and-mortar archive or library, some
online open sources are limited by a lack of funds.

For instance, you might see notices like the one that Virginia Commonwealth
University professor Roice Luke and University of Richmond associate professor
Darrell Walden put out to the general public. They’ve asked for volunteers to
help them digitalize the Virginia
Freedmen Project, a collection of records from The Bureau of Refugees,
Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, a federal agency established in 1865 that assisted
freed slaves in becoming citizens after the Civil War.

  1. Project Gutenberg:
    This open access project seems to fade in comparison to the updated presence
    provided by Google
    Scholar Beta    . However, Project Gutenberg — launched in 1971 by Michael
    Hart — provides the first example of a free library project and the first
    producer of free electronic books. And, despite the fact that flashier faces
    have moved into this arena, Project Gutenberg still enjoys over two million
    downloads per month.

The Internet
Archive also shores this category as an example of an open access resource.
This nonprofit online library includes texts, audio, moving images, and software
as well as archived Web pages in their collections. Like a paper library, this
archive provides open access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general
public.

It’s impossible to offer all the online research materials available online,
so I’ll point you to the Directory
of Open Access Journals so you can find documents that might fit your interests.

Operating Systems

  1. Linux: Without hesitation,
    Linux provides the success story in this category. Linux was created by a
    student (Linus Torvalds) in Helsinki in 1991 with the assistance of developers
    from around the world. Linux is free, it shares its work with everyone — including
    competitors — and its business model is motivated primarily by adrenaline,
    altruism, and peer respect rather than by money. Yet, Linux’s functionality,
    adaptability and robustness has made it the main alternative for proprietary
    operating systems, especially where budgets are a main concern.

Look for Ubuntu to enter
this category as an up-and-coming success story. This particular Linux distribution combines
the breadth of Debian
and includes the latest Gnome
release in its download. It’s based on a user-friendly interface for the individual
who wants to wean himself from proprietory systems (such as Microsoft Windows or Mac OS).

Based on the philosophy that “It Should Just Work”, Ubuntu
provides solutions that can be used on the desktop or on servers. Many
librarians have embraced Ubuntu as a solution to proprietary operating costs
and licensing fees. Additionally, Ubuntu offers Edubuntu
as an open source OS targeted to schools and other educational environments.

You can use Netcraft
to “peek” into a Web site’s platform to determine if its claim to
“open” source or access extends to its OS and to its server as well.

Software

The open source software/free software (OSS/FS) category is broad, so the means
to narrow this niche down to one single success story is more difficult than
any other in this list. Plus, there’s a minor difference betwee OSS and FS,
as OSS
implies open access to source code as well as to distribution and licensing.
FS,
on the other hand, implies that the code, distribution, and licensing are up
to the individual who uses the software. This difference seems minor at first
glance, but if you read closely you’ll realize that an individual can sell FS
materials for profit (see the Free
Software Foundation for further clarity).

  1. OpenOffice.org: Based on a focus in education and a
    pattern of high usage within educational structures (students
    and instructors    ), OpenOffice.org provides the success story in this category.
    This software makes the transition from educational environments to business
    applications with its multi-platform office productivity suite. Owned by Sun
    Microsystems, this front-end application seeks to replace proprietary software (such as Microsoft Office)
    with its broad language
    offerings     and its features
    as well as with its collaborative
    efforts     with users. Look for continued efforts to combine other open source
    applications, such as Mozilla’s
    Lightning    , which combines the Sunbird calendar with Thunderbird email.

Running neck-to-neck with Open Office is the Sakai
Project, an “online Collaboration and Learning Environment” that
seeks to replace many proprietary educational software in classrooms from kindergarten
to college.

Browsers

  1. Mozilla
    Firefox    : This browser probably doesn’t need an introduction or
    an argument as the success story for this category. But, to be fair, it should
    be mentioned that all products offered through the Mozilla Firefox Web site
    are available free-of-charge for Windows, Mac, and Linux computers in more
    than 35 languages. This compatibility and availability meets all the standards
    suggested by the OpenSourceWare Consortium and its major supporter, the The
    William and Flora Hewlett Foundation    .

Education

Open source or access projects are receiving attention in the classroom as
well. While many projects have relied on cooperation between developers and
user groups — and they still do — colleges are now seeing the wisdom in creating
an atmosphere that encourages an understanding for these resources.

  1. Google:
    Google provides the success story here, simply because their apps bring books,
    scholarly journals, maps, news, patent searches, docs and spreadsheets, and
    even API code to any browser or OS. Google has won the hearts and minds of
    many instructors and students. But, that’s not the only story behind this
    success. Google offers a
    page for educators     to learn how to use these apps in the classroom. Google
    employees are out into the field     in efforts to reach University
    of Washington     classes as well.

Other educational options are few and far between at this point; but, since
Carnegie Mellon West‘s
Software Management program has incorporated
a course about open source software into its program, you might expect other
schools to follow suit.

Individuals

With resources like EDUCAUSE
that focus on how open source projects can benefit teachers and students, the
clear success story in this category belongs to the people who — whether for
economic reasons or for the sheer delight in learning to use a “free”
resource — belong to the educational side of this open source movement:

  1. Instructors: Instructors, along with their educational
    institutions, have made the decision that open source venues supply the economic
    solution to problems defined by school budgets. Although the learning curve
    is not easy at times, instructors from preschool to Ph.D. levels have found
    resources that help them to decide what to use, when to use it, and how it’s
    all done. These resources are often delineated by subjects, countries, and
    languages, but all can find resources on the Internet — like through the EduResources
    Portal     — that can lead to solutions for open source questions.
  1. Students: Although some
    students     feel that programs like the OCW deprive a student of the bond
    that often comes from a student/instructor relationship, most students have
    embraced open sources and open access with a budget-minded joy and with a
    skeptical eye toward college programs. An MIT
    survey of users     showed that about a third of freshmen who were aware of
    MIT’s OCW site before attending the university said it made a significant
    impact on their decision to enroll.

Other student benefits to using open source and open access include:

  • An increase in educational opportunities for those who can’t access a classroom.
  • The ability to see the value and quality of courses offered before making
    an application to a college.
  • Access to supplemental learning materials.

Finally, I should point out that a fine line between open source and open access
has
been defined as well. Open source, according to the linked article, “refers
to any enterprise where data (e.g. journal article, piece of software) may be
modified by the relevant community and those modifications may be recontributed
to the larger whole.” Open access, on the other hand, has come to mean
data — like peer-reviewed documents — that may be read without charge. But I
would argue that a person can modify how open access materials are perceived
when these documents are cited in new theoretical works.

The terms within the “open” educational realm, just as the formats
listed in the categories above, will continue to evolve as “open”
education permeates society beyond the college campus. If you take part in the
success stories listed above, you may discover new success stories that are
developing every day.

Update (3/8/07):

Since this article was published, we’ve received numerous
e-mails and responses to our choices for the “10 Success Stories” listed
above. The loudest protest concerned our Moodle omission, and a slap on the wrist
is deserved for that oversight. We were most impressed with the Open Office transition
from education to business, so our measurements for success went beyond the educational
platform in this instance. We apologize for our omission, and we’ll be anxious
to see how Moodle fares when we decide to update this list at a later date.

Some readers noted that MIT went with a commercial option (Microsoft Content
Management Server 2002) for their content management system. We recognized this
matter as MIT is “open” about
this choice and they state their reasons behind their selection. (They do
use Linux for their operating system.) Still, we stand behind our selection
because MIT has motivated many other higher learning institutions to incorporate
open access to materials online, and because MIT’s efforts behind the OpenCourseWare
Consortium could not go unrecognized.

We also understand that our criteria for judging weren’t that apparent to our
readers. We made our choices based upon the following:

  • Initial offerings, i.e. was this choice the first to offer open access/open
    source materials and platforms, and if not, have they been around long enough
    to influence how open source/open access is perceived within a given category?
  • Their readership levels, but even more so on how they’ve affected and continue
    to affect learning at all levels. (Although the focus remained primarily at the
    college level for this article.)
  • How that choice altered the open source/access aspects in other areas, both
    geographically and as inspiration for further development.
  • Their popularity based on international access and language offerings.
  • Not judged on the amount of money used/needed to gear up, expand, or to continue
    operations.

With that said, so many open source apps and open access tools (such as Elgg,
Lams, Plone,
Dspace, .LRN,
LogiCampus, etc.) have joined
this movement with so many offereings that it’s impossible to mention them all
here. Additionally, we didn’t set out to add more than one link to each category,
but we felt that all the sources mentioned deserved notice. The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, for example, offers more than encyclopedic information and they’re
definitely more citable than Wikipedia. But, once again, we stand by our choices
for this go-round based upon our criteria (except for Moodle) .

We think that this educational movement is vital and necessary, and that all
open source/access tools should be heralded. Thank you to all who made their
voices heard on our choices and about your choices as well.

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