I’ll be at ALT-C next Tuesday to talk about Open Source Options for Education as part of the “OERs and OSSs” session in the morning. I’ll also be around for the rest of the day so feel free to collar me for a chat about anything OSS-related! Here’s the session details to whet your appetite: Levelling … Read more
Earlier this month EdX, the nonprofit organisation set up by MIT and Harvard to provide a MOOC platform, released part of its code under an open source licence – the Affero GPL. MOOCs – “Massive Online Open Courses” – have been hitting the headlines frequently in 2013, with high profile proponents and some big name … Read more
Interactive whiteboards are something you find in pretty much every school, college and university these days. Mostly these come from one of two companies, Smart and Promethean, both of which also supply the main software application that typically teachers and students interact with. This application is closed source and runs on Windows and does some … Read more
Over to Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research: Course Builder is in fact a means of building dynamic online teaching materials that must be hosted on Google’s Cloud Platform-as-a-Service App Engine. So although the code itself is open source, it is closely linked with a paid service provided by the code’s authors. While there is a … Read more
As with many Higher Education institutions, Manchester Metropoliton University (MMU) recently faced the challenge of migrating its Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) from WebCT Vista, which was purchased by Blackboard in 2006 and is approaching its end of life. MMU’s choice was to migrate to the open source Moodle VLE, using a solution hosted at the … Read more
Last week JISC CETIS put on a WidgetBash event. OSS Watch pitched in since W3C Widgets are an area we are particularly interested in having taken some code from the University of Bolton into the Apache Software Foundations incubator as Apache Wookie (incubating). This two day event focused on getting people up to speed on … Read more
OSS Watch spends a lot of effort actively promoting the practice of open development as an effective means of achieving project sustainability. There are also important benefits for users who are developing tools based on an open source project and today I came across a great example that illustrates how to engage with the community … Read more
OSS Watch would like to congratulate Josie Fraser and Simon Mather, two of the contenders for the Learning Technologist of the Year Award. Both have presented at OSS Watch workshops earlier this year. Emerge’s Josie Fraser spoke at one of the five expert workshops OSS Watch organized in July. Simon Mather, Head of Software Engineering … Read more
Why is it I only ever seem to blog about WebPA and its successes? Surely there are other JISC funded projects out there that have similar levels of success in engaging with a user and developer community? I suspect the difference is that Nicola Wilkinson, systems developer on the WebPA project, puts the effort into … Read more
Perhaps wary that the date might detract from the news, ISO – the International Organization for Standards – waited until today before announcing that Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) document description schema has finally been accepted as an ISO standard as of April 1, 2008. There has been a long and bitter battle over whether … Read more