Using Open Source to Building and Accessing Learning Objects and Online Courses

As e-learning continuously gains the interest of the scientific community, industry, and government, a wide variety of learning technology products have been incorporated into the marketplace. Advances in information and communication technologies are in favor of the incorporation of innovative services and functionalities in such systems, though content creation and delivery remain the two key factors in any e-learning system. Therefore, in this chapter, we present the design and implementation of a tool targeted at building and accessing learning objects and online courses through the Web. This tool aims to facilitate instructors and trainers to easily develop accessible, reusable, and traceable learning content that can meet their distant students’ needs for anytime and anyplace learning. Learners are able to access learning content, in addition to consulting, at any time, reports on their interactions within a course and get support by subject experts. Furthermore, all users can request to upgrade their role in the system and, thus, actively participate in the learning process. Special attention has been paid on the utilization of reliable and qualitative open source technologies and Web standards so that the proposed solution can form an easily accessible system.

Open Culture for Education and Research Environment

Some contemporary theoretical and technological issues that are becoming of paramount importance for building a cross-disciplinary research and knowledge-sharing environment are outlined, pointing out those cultural changes implied by the increasing adoption of the ICT. In the unprecedented abundance of information sources that can be reached through the Internet, the growing need for reliability will not be met without a major change of scholar’s, teacher’s, and learner’s attitudes to foster enhanced trusted relationship. In this chapter, emphasis is placed on the open source organizational model, highlighting some of the key elements of the open culture: knowledge-sharing technologies, interoperability, reusability and quality assurance.

The Development of the Open ACS Community

OpenACS is a high-level community framework designed for developing collaborative Internet sites. It started from a university project at MIT, got momentum from the ArsDigita Foundation, and split up into a commercial and an open source version. OpenACS has proven its durability and utility by surviving the death of its parent company (ArsDigita) to grow into a vibrant grassroots collection of independent consultants and small companies implementing diverse and complex Web solutions around the globe for NPOs, philanthropy, and profit. A heritage from this history is a still dominant position of contributors with commercial interests that, in its intensity, is above the norm found in open source projects. In this paper, OpenACS, with its community is presented as a case study documenting the forces between commercial interests, securing investments, and technical development in a large open source project with a large proportion of commercial involvement.

Evaluating Open Source in Government

The use of free and open source software (F/OSS) in the public sector has been accelerating over the last ten years. The benefits seem to be obvious: No licensing costs, unlimited flexibility, vendor independence, a support community, and so forth. But as with everything else in life, a successful implementation of F/OSS in government is not as simple as it might look initially. The implementation of F/OSS should build on a solid evaluation of core business criteria in all their complexity. In this chapter we analyze the evaluation considerations that government bodies should undertake before deciding between F/OSS and traditional software (SW), including the way knowledge networks and communities of practice work, total cost of ownership, and core functional requirements. The chapter presents a methodology conceptualizing this process in a comprehensive framework, focusing on the interaction between the strategic and business process level and the SW/infrastructure level. The chapter aims at presenting a framework enabling IT strategist and management from the “business side” of public sector institutions to evaluate F/OSS vs. traditional SW in tight cooperation with the IT side of the organization.

Making Knowledge Management Systems Open

This chapter presents an action research-based case study of the development of pKADS (portable knowledge asset development system), an open source, desktop-based knowledge management (KM) tool, implemented in Java and targeted at government and nongovernment organizations. pKADS was a collaborative project involving Business Information Systems, University College Cork, Ireland and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and was funded by the government of Ireland. Development of the application took just three months, using an agile development approach and some reuse of existing open source code. The chapter discusses the background to the pKADS project and prior UNFPA KM efforts, the technical and conceptual architectures of the pKADS application, the roles played by open source components and open data standards, the rationale for releasing pKADS as open source software, and the subsequent results. Future research, in the form of developing open source, Intranet/Internet-based KM tools for the Government of Ireland—eGovernment Knowledge Platform (eGovKP) is also briefly discussed.

Human-Centered Design of a Semantically Enabled Knowledge Management System for Agile Software Engineering

Developing human-engineered systems is considered as a challenge that addresses a wide area of expertise; computer scientists as well as social scientists. These experts have to work together closely in teams in order to build intelligent systems to support agile software development. The methodology developed in the RISE project enables and supports the design of human-centered knowledge-sharing platforms, such as Wikis based on standards in the field of education science. The project “RISE” (Reuse In Software Engineering) is part of the research program “Software Engineering 2006” funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). The goal was to improve the reuse of artifacts in software engineering, and brought together researchers from education science (The Department of Educational Sciences and Professional Development at the Technical University of Kaiserslautern) and computer science (Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) and the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)) with industrial partners (Empolis GmbH and brainbot technologies AG). This chapter gives an overview about the human-centered design of Wiki-based knowledge and learning management systems in software engineering projects, and raises several requirements one should keep in mind when building human-centered systems to support knowledge and learning management.

Making Government Policies for Education Possible by Means of Open Source Technology

In this chapter, we describe the products and services offered by the Department of Computer Science of the Federal University of Paraná within the scope of the Paraná Digital project. The department has designed laboratories with Internet access for 2,100 public schools of the state, with innovative technology through an environment entirely based upon free software tools, centralized management as well as continuous maintenance, and betterment of the services offered. We place special emphasis on our strategies, aiming at contributing to the adoption of such strategies in contexts relatively similar to ours, with which a parallel may be drawn concerning the hypothesis situation of the present project.

The GALILEI Platform

For a few years, social software has appeared on the Internet to challenge the problem of handling the mass of information available. In this chapter, we present the GALILEI platform using social browsing to build communities of interests where relevant information and expertise are shared. The users are described in terms of profiles, with each profile corresponding to one specific area of interest. While browsing, users’ profiles are computed on the basis of both the content of the consulted documents and the relevance assessments from the profiles. These profiles are then grouped into communities, which allows documents of interest to be shared among members of a same community and experts to be identified.

European National Educational School Authorities' Actions Regarding Open Content and Open Source Software in Education

This chapter provides an overview into policies in the area of e-learning that ten European countries, all members of European Schoolnet, have taken regarding open content and free and open source software (FOSS) to be used to support and enhance learning. Additionally, it elaborates on European Schoolnet’s initiatives to support open learning resources exchange in Europe. European Schoolnet (EUN) promotes the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in European schools, acting as a gateway to national and regional educational authorities and school networks towards Europe. A variety of actions have been initiated by a number of European educational authorities from analysis and feasibility studies to the development of educational software based on open source as well as open educational content.

Riki

Many software organizations have a reputation for producing expensive, low-quality software systems. This results from the inherent complexity of software itself as well as the chaotic organization of developers building these systems. Therefore, we set a stage for software development based on social software for knowledge and learning management to support reuse in software engineering as well as knowledge sharing in and between projects. In the RISE (Reuse in Software Engineering) project, we worked with several German SMEs to develop a system for the reuse of software engineering products such as requirement documents. The methodology and technology developed in the RISE project makes it possible to share knowledge in the form of software artifacts, experiences, or best practices based on pedagogic approaches. This chapter gives an overview of the reuse of knowledge and so-called Learning Components in software engineering projects and raises several requirements one should keep in mind when building such systems to support knowledge transfer and reuse.