I just finished reading an article in Educause Quarterly, Volume 31, No.2 , 2008 titled, "Open Source Software in Education: Academia has adopted open source software for some online learning initiatives because it addresses persistent technical challenges" by Shaheen E. Lakhan and Kavita Jhunjhunwala. It discusses how Open Source Content Management Systems have been adopted for use by some universities. I was surprised to learn just how many countries had their own open source learning systems and that they were putting them to use as educational venues.
Actually, there are several initiatives taking place to implement Open Source Learning Management System Tools in different places around the world. In the United States universities are using Moodle http://www.moodle.org/ that according to this report has a learning community of 10 million. In the United Kingdom they are using Bodington http://www.bodington.org/, a learning system in place at the University of Leeds and the Univerity of Oxford. Claroline http://www.claroline.net/ has an international base and is available in 35 languages and has users in more than 80 countries.
MIT OpenCourseWare makes undergraduate and graduate course material available on the Interent. Many of us have been aware that open source tools and applications have been adopted for academic use. Some of the most utilized being social networking sites, video- and photo-sharing sites, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts and discussion forums. We've even seen Drupal and Moodle adopted by universities such as the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. However, until this article I did not know other universities around the world were using open source learning ware like MIT.
Not only are they using it but countries around the world are creating learning content together. Dokeos, a web-based application http://www.dokeos.com/ "was developed with the global contributions of universities, organizations and individual programmers." If any American academic administrators doubt the global collaboration taking place now, I suggest they get busy visiting these sites.
