Riina: Are there open source initiatives or communities for educational users?

Georg Pleger: Yes, there is a number of open source initiatives in the educational area. Many of them are listed at schoolforge.net. The different initiatives strongly vary in scope and ambition. We would like to contribute to these activities by coordinating the EduZope on a European level.

Riina: What has an open source educational community to offer to European education on the policy making level?

Georg: As summarized in the Open Source Study by the European Commission the specific offers are on three categories: quality, economy and philosophy. We work towards an affordable and high quality ICT software infrastructure by offering a clear concept.

The four main characterises of EduZope concept are the following:

• Scope: integration of web based content management system, authoring environment for standardised learning materials and learning platform;
  
• Specifications and standards: strong orientation on implementation and further development of European and international recognised specifications and standards;
  
• Licensing: free software under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL);
  
• Technical basis: we build on the ZOPE web application framework and the strong international community behind it.

Riina: You mentioned specifications and standards; what is open source communities' standpoint to standards and interoperability issues?

Georg: Within European body for standardisation in eLearning, the CEN/ISSS Workshop Learning Technologies (WSLT), a new work item has been proposed aiming to develop an open source framework for interoperable components of eLearning systems. We are a member institution in the workshop and strongly support these activities started mainly by our French colleagues.

Providing end users with open source example implementations of specifications and standards will increase the acceptance and understanding of these specifications. Our aim for the next months is to implement parts of the IMS Learning Design specification. We invite other institutions and projects to join these activities.  

Riina: Seems like you are contributing to open standards, what about the school level?

Georg: On the school level an open source approach offers an opportunity to start using advanced ICT systems step by step without big investments. Open source software can be adapted to existing infrastructure more easily then closed software.

Moreover, the school is not looked into a specific software product ruled by a single software company. So the school is in a better position to decide about upgrades, new components to be integrated, etc.

You can also build on your own software know-how and influence the further development. The open source approach clearly corresponds to a culture of knowledge sharing which could be practiced more within educational institutions.

Riina: How could a Ministry of Education benefit from open source initiatives?

Georg: On the long run open source solutions become a clear cost saving factor. The earlier we come to a coordinated European strategy about using open source in the educational sector -and the public sector in general - the better.

To give an example: The content management system Plone, which is the first major component for EduZope, is already available in more than 20 languages. No single ministry or other educational institution would be able to organize such activities in a closed source mode. Developments from projects at different educational levels can relatively easily be reused.

We collaborate for example with our colleagues from the project e-teaching@university sponsored by the Bertelsmann-Foundation. There will be other synergies with developments in the eGovernment projects which use open source frameworks. The web application framework ZOPE is already used widely across the different sectors.

Riina: How about a school, could they benefit from open source initiatives?

Georg: Using open source tools allows for a much better communication between the different parties that are involved: end users, decision makers, developers, standardization bodies etc.

I like the vision of an "online social software methodology" as expressed by Lee Bryant. Open source is one component in this direction of software becoming smarter, simpler, and more social. The individual teacher and student becomes - if he or she wants to - much closer to the developer.

Riina: Thanks a lot, Georg. Can people contact you for any specific questions or comments?
Georg: Sure, here´s my email: georg.pleger@transIT.ac.at

Links:

Schoolforge:
http://www.schoolforge.net

Unesco's website for Free Software and Courceware:
http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/ and http://www.unesco.org/webworld/portal_freesoft/Software/Courseware_Tools/

Study on Pooling Open Source Software by the European Commission: http://europa.eu.int/ISPO/ida/export/files/en/1115.pdf

Center for educational technology interoperability standards:
http://www.cetis.ac.uk

Web application framework ZOPE:
http://www.zope.org

Content management system Plone:
http://www.plone.org

e-teaching@university:
http://www.e-teaching.org

Lee Bryant: Smarter, simpler social:
http://www.headshift.com/moments/archive/sss2.html

EduZope:
http://www.eduzope.org