Learning opportunities in FLOSS
Rüdiger Glott (UNU-Merit)
Philipp Schmidt (UWC)
FKFT Free Knowledge, Free Technology
Education for a free information society
First International Conference, Barcelona July 15th to 17th 2008

Agenda
Part 1 Characteristics of learning in traditional learning environments
and in FLOSS
Part 2 Example: “Students' Knowledge Base”
Part 3 Conclusions

Part 1
Characteristics of learning in traditional learning environments
and in FLOSS

Characteristics of learning in traditional learning
environments and in FLOSS
Stylised Characteristics of Learning in Traditional
Educational Settings
✔Roles of teachers and learners are fixed
✔Static content (more or less)
✔ Definition and changes of content depend on teachers
✔ Content is organised in form of fixed curricula
✔ Re-usage of content rather by teachers than by learners
✔ Exclusive access (performance tests, financial capacities, etc.)
✔ Limited set of learning resources (books, readers, specified websites, ...)
✔ Learners are consumers (passive)
✔ Learners must show performance (no lurkers!)
✔ Performance is continuously measured across all themes / disciplines
✔ Support and learning resources are often disconnected
✔ Support is mainly provided by teachers
✔ Opaque and hierarchical structures
✔ Top-down knowledge transfer
✔ Slow adoption of new educational technologies

Characteristics of learning in traditional learning
environments and in FLOSS
Stylised Characteristics of Learning in FLOSS
✔ Dynamic roles of teachers and learners
✔ Dynamic content (regular revisions and updates)
✔ Definition and changes of content depend on community
✔ Re-usage of content through teachers and learners
✔ Open access (no performance tests, no charges, etc.)
✔ Broad set of learning resources
✔ Learners are also producers (active)
✔ Learners need not to show performance (lurkers are welcome!)
✔ Performance can (but does not need to) be measured
✔ Performance counts rather theme-specific than in general
✔ Support and learning resources are connected
✔ Support is provided by teachers and learners
✔ Open and transparent structures foster discussions between equals
✔ Discursive knowledge transfer
✔ Fast adoption of new educational technologies

Characteristics of learning in traditional learning
environments and in FLOSS
Requirements from Open Participatory Learning
Environments (OPLE)
• Interest must be generated
● Content must be generated / collected, structured and provided
● Technical and organisational maintenance must be provided (technical
infrastructure, changes, links, communication, ...)
● A (large enough) community must be established
● A support network must be established within the community
● Quality assurance must be provided
● Visibility (of good contributions) must be secured (incentives)

Part 2
Example: “Students' Knowledge Base”

Example: “Students' Knowledge Base”
Brief Overview
• Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME)
• Student Wiki of Open Educational Resources (http://wiki.sch.bme.hu)
• Provides learning materials for Electrical Engineering and Informatics Faculty
• Including:
✔FAQ
✔Forum
✔Manuals
✔Mailing
✔Wiki

Example: “Students' Knowledge Base”
Establishment
● Project started as an intranet site (set up by 4-5 students living at the
Schoenherz Dormitory of the Budapest University of Technology and
Economics)
● Original motivation: hobby of informatics students, with the objective to
save the other students some time by providing a centralised server for all
materials that is part of their curriculum
● Students in the dormitory were already sharing and exchanging materials
regularly, the wiki simply provided a new and more convenient way of
doing that
● Creators started setting up those courses first that they took themselves
● Next step: Lecturers were informed about the wiki and reviewed it, then
started uploading materials themselves
● First few months: site was only accessible within the dormitory, access to
the site was opened up to the public after this initial phase
●Created without requiring funding from University

Example: “Students' Knowledge Base”
Current Status (February 2008)
● 5980 pages of content
● receives on average 1.2 million hits per month
● 2628 registered users
● more than 500 users are regularly logged on
● 890 changes to the content per month
● Materials are reviewed by the community and get corrected if something
is wrong
● Reputation / visibility: no formal assessment; participants gain reputation
from participation - the wiki provides the name of the user who created a
particular page
● Official position of the faculty with respect to the site is mostly positive
● Problem: Knowledge Base cannot grow without funding

Part 3
Conclusions

Conclusions
Requirements from OPLE - Revisited
• Interest must be generated => No
● Content must be generated / collected, structured and provided => Yes
● Technical and organisational maintenance must be provided (technical
infrastructure, changes, links, communication, ...) => Yes
● A (large enough) community must be established => No
● A support network must be established within the community => No
● Quality assurance must be provided => Yes
● Visibility (of good contributions) must be secured (incentives) => Yes

Conclusions
Lessons Learnt
• No need to generate interest if OPLE is created within a field of latent interest
● Traditional learning environments provide such fields
● A (large enough) community is inherent to such fields
● Support networks are likely to evolve in a self-organised way in such fields
●Quality assurance is eased in such fields because the community is easy to
overlook and its members are familiar with the content
●Visibility (of good contributions) can easily be provided because community
members know each other
● Expansion within University is difficult if volunteers with IT skills and
infrastructure are missing in other departments and if there is no funding
●Alternative: Expanding by connecting different departments with similar
Knowledge Bases across Universities (Problem: Organisational coherence)

Thank you for your attention!
Contact:
Rüdiger Glott glott@merit.unu.edu / r.glott@merit.unimaas.nl
Philipp Schmidt phi.schmidt@gmail.com
For further information on the FLOSSCom project see: www.flosscom.net