{"id":5875,"date":"2024-05-21T10:58:58","date_gmt":"2024-05-21T14:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lpi.org\/open-education-many-ways-target-world-disparities\/"},"modified":"2024-05-24T11:52:57","modified_gmt":"2024-05-24T15:52:57","slug":"open-education-many-ways-target-world-disparities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lpi.org\/fr\/blog\/2024\/05\/21\/open-education-many-ways-target-world-disparities\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Education: The Many Ways to Target World Disparities"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s universally recognized that education is the basis for solving problems everywhere: poverty<\/a>, the status of women, adaptation to environmental disruption, and more. Anything that can spread high-quality education\u2014and nowadays, we must specifically call for accurate education\u2014is therefore contributing to saving our world. This article updates an article on education originally published in July 2021 as part of LPIS\u2019 Open Anniversary.<\/p>\n

Education has many aspects, including teaching itself, stand-alone materials such as books and videos, and access to the internet or other media. We\u2019ll cover a variety of contributions to expanding education in this article.<\/p>\n

Open Educational Resources<\/h2>\n

The most widespread and well-known phenomenon in open education is free course materials. The official term, Open Educational Resources (OER), was launched as an international movement by UNESCO in a 2012 declaration<\/a>. The declaration was covered in an article by Creative Commons<\/a>, which has a site devoted to OER<\/a>. The Hewlett Foundation<\/a> is another long-time backer of OER.<\/p>\n

OER commonly offers a bundle of resources in many media to support the teaching of a single course. The materials may include documents, videos, suggested readings, and curricula. One of the oldest and largest such archives is OpenCourseWare<\/a> at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The university started accumulating syllabuses, lecture notes, videos, and other materials from its professors in 2002, and now claims to serve millions of visitors every year. Their website and YouTube channel have racked up more than 300 million visits during their two decades.<\/p>\n

One of the reasons OpenCourseWare makes a good case study, besides its size and longevity, is that MIT released a major study of its impact in 2005<\/a>, followed by smaller annual reports since then.<\/p>\n

One intriguing finding in the study is that many visitors redistribute the materials, in print or electronic form, to students who lack internet connections (page 8). We will see other projects in this article that tap educational materials online and bring them to people who can\u2019t get online themselves. This phenomenon illustrates how the internet intersects with other distribution media in the modern world.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s truly significant about OER sites such as OpenCourseWare is the dynamic adaptation of materials made by professors and others. Anyone is free to modify and redistribute the materials, as with free software. The 2005 MIT study found that \u201c62% combine OCW materials with other content; 38% adapt course syllabi; 26% adapt assignments or exams\u201d (page 3). This means, for instance, that instructors and even students can add material of local interest. And they can do translations: in fact, MIT is cooperating with several institutions to do translations into several languages (page 7).<\/p>\n

MIT OpenCourseWare works through the OER’s Open 2030 Working Group<\/a> to increase the diversity and spread of its visitors, and started a collaboration with a network of US-based historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs)<\/a> in 2023.<\/p>\n

Despite the radically open approach to modifications, I\u2019ve found that most OER sites prohibit noncommercial use. The free software movement generally wants commercial use to be allowed<\/a>. One OER site that does permit commercial use is OpenStax<\/a>, from Rice University.<\/p>\n

MIT, as a science institution (with departments in economics, marketing, and some other topics as well) has an advantage in designing open source materials because their courses cover topics that have no geographic limitations. Other institutions, which may offer courses on history or policy-making in a single country, would find their courses to be of less interest on a world market.<\/p>\n

LinuxTips<\/a> is a training program in Brazil that focuses on populations who are under-represented in computing by race or gender. According to Cesar Brod, LPI\u2019s Community Engagement Director for Spanish and Portuguese Regions, 75 percent of LinuxTips students receive full scholarships. All of their learning materials are released cost-free<\/a>. EDUCATRANSFORMA<\/a> is another Brazilian project, friendly to transgender people, set up in 2019 to offer bootcamps about Linux.<\/p>\n

Many other institutions offer OER, including a large collection are Reynold Community College<\/a> and some edX courses<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Educational Platforms<\/h2>\n

We turn next to open computer systems designed for educational use. These systems are based on GNU\/Linux, both because the licensing allows widespread, free distribution and because the systems themselves are open. Teachers and students can fix bugs, make enhancements, and learn valuable software skills along the way.
\nSome of these distributions are more finely tuned for educational use than others. In general, they contain games, educational resources, useful tools for content creation, and sometimes tools for organizing and conducting classes. Many distributions are useful in homes as well as schools, and often other institutions.<\/p>\n

A notable example of these efforts is So.Di.Linux<\/a>, a free-of-charge distribution of digital educational resources that can be used as a live USB\/DVD or installed directly on a computer. The name comes from \u201csoftware didattico libero\u201d (free educational software in Italian) and denotes an initiative designed for Italian schools. The project was initiated by the Institute for Educational Technology of the Italian National Research Council (CNR-ITD) and was initially funded in 2003 as a research project by AICA (Italian Association for Automated Calculation).<\/p>\n

So.Di.Linux offers a comprehensive range of educational apps and resources (both online and offline) supported by informative documentation from CNR-ITD\u2019s educational resources database, Essediquadro<\/a>. In addition, it provides several FLOSS assistive technologies (e.g., screen reader, magnifiers, on-screen keyboard) together with guides and tutorials about how to use them.So.Di.Linux users can navigate learning resources by following specific themes (for instance, \u201cDeveloping computational thinking\u201d, \u201cProducing interactive lessons\u201d, or \u201cTeaching how to use the web\u201d), a feature that helps new users to find the resources they need more easily.<\/p>\n

Starting in 2007, a concerted effort wasn made to render So.Di.Linux more inclusive by adopting Universal Design principles<\/a>. Italian teachers and students could customize the environment to make it more suitable to their specific needs. Development on So.Di.Linux appears to have stopped in February 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some other distributions include:<\/h3>\n