Description

During the past years there has been a growing trend within traditional education to ‘open up’. The case of MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative marked the start of the Open Educational Resource movement, a movement largely strategically driven on institutional levels. With this movement good quality tools and educational materials were made freely available to educators and learners throughout the globe.
More recently one can observe a further type of openness within the educational domain, an openness where formally enrolled students engage with their peers at the Web 2.0, resulting to an ever blurring border between the formal and the informal and providing the potential of taking further advantage of the opportunities the participatory Web 2.0 provides. Those attempts, unlike the OER case, seem to be more driven by individuals on a course level, but not be strategically addressed at the institutional level.
An analysis of the organisation of learning in Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities and FLOSS as a learning environment that has been carried out as part of this work suggests that FLOSS communities are indeed worthwhile to be considered as one bests practice case of informal learning environments; and as a benchmark for other attempts to organise learning in a more self-organised and opener way than traditional learning environments. The same analysis has also shown limitations of the FLOSS approach. Therefore the objective can not be to abandon traditional higher education practices as we know them and to replace one system (traditional HE) through another (FLOSS type learning), but instead to find the optimal mix of the best principles of both systems in order to achieve maximal synergies.
There appear to be three different scenarios on the adoption of FLOSS approaches within educational settings, the inside, the outside or the hybrid approach, with each of them having a different level of complexity and a different degree of benefits as detailed within this work.