Open Source potentially offers unique opportunities for the Education sector, including cost effective infrastructure, education management and delivery tools, student tracking applications as well of course as the many thousands of applications freely available for students to use and learn from.

Common uses

There seem to be three main uses of Open Source Software in education:

• Common infrastructure (servers, websites, administration systems, PCs, desktop publishing, no licencing restrictions and loads of applications available)
• Delivering education (e-learning applications such as LAMS or Moodle)
• Teaching ICT (learning languages such as Python, loads of applications available, and code to learn from)
  

Case Studies

See the Case Studies page for all case studies. 

Application listings

Moodle, LAMS, Schooltools, Plone, Joomla, and many more. See the repositories below.

Repositories for Software

• Eduforge - New Zealand
  
• Schoolforge
  

References 

Below are some excellent reference documents about Open Source Software in Education:

Australia

• The Organisation for Open Source Software Study - Paul Courant & Michael Carter, Ithaka (2006)
  
• Factors affecting the use of open source software in tertiary education institutions - David G. Glance, Jeremy Kerr and Alex Reid (2004)
  
• Open Access, Open Archives and Open Source - The Australian Academy of the Humanities (2005)
  
• Open Source documents on EdNA - an excellent set of papers from EdNA sources about Open Source
  
• Educators Wary of Open Source - Jennifer Foreshew, ZDNet Article (2005)
• Addressing the challenges (particularly note the section on Open Source) - CoSN Tech Resources (2005)
  
• Open Source in Education resources - Open Source Industry Australia
• Open Source Education resources (includes best practices, benefits studies, catalogs and more) - Open Source Victoria
  
• Open Source in Australian Education - Best Practices Guide - Con Zymaris, Open Source Victoria (2003)
• A catalog of Free and Open Source Software for Education - Open Source Victoria, Australia, (2005)
• Open Education Australia (a loose collaboration of information from educators in this space)
• Work by Kathryn Moyle on Open Source in Education, mainly schools:
  
• Open source software and Australian school education - Dr Kathryn Moyle, MCEETYA ICT, Australia (2003)
• Total Cost of Ownership and Open Source Software - Dr Kathryn Moyle, DECS SA, Australia (2004)
• Open Source Software suitable for use in Australian and New Zealand schools - Felix Hudson and Dr Kathryn Moyle, DECS, SA, Australia (2004)
• Report of the trial of open source software conducted at Grant High School - Dr Kathryn Moyle in collaboration with Mr Peter Ruwoldt, DECS, SA, Australia (2004)

International

• Open Source and Open Standards for e-Learning - Queens University School of Medicine, Canada
• Open Source University policy - Buffalo University, New York