Developing an initial open-source platform for the higher education sector - A case study: Alhosn University

The higher education community is concerned about the cost and performance of commercial software products. A common view is that existing proprietary options do not have the features required by instructors and students or allow for cost-effective customization. One way to address these problems in poorer countries, and hence improve their quality of education and access to knowledge, would be to consider the modern educational tools available with no license fees through open-source software. This paper presents an initial development of a complete open-source software platform called the Open University Project, which contains software that precisely fulfills user requirements in the higher education sector. The paper also highlights the financial advantages of introducing open-source software in developing countries and its positive impact on educational quality. © 2009 IEEE

Open Source Certification and Educational Process

This paper discusses possibilities to benefit software engineering and computer sciences educational process from involving students in open source software certification activities. On the other hand the open source certification community can take advantages of this involvement if it cooperates with educational one. The situation is considered in the context of Russian higher institutes of education but the conclusions can be applicable to other institutes as well

Transition from Closed to Open: Case of Integrated Library Automation Software in India

Prior to Open Source Integrated Library Systems (OSILSs) availability, libraries found two alternatives to automate their housekeeping operations - either develop an exclusive in-house software system or purchase a commercial one. Commercial packages differ with each other on pricing and license agreements and function modules. Now, many libraries are shifting from such traditional proprietary automation systems where the cost of software is assumed to be a major concern, to free/open source system considering the flexibility and adaptability in using and customizing it to fit their local needs. The study evaluates the rate of adoption of OSILS in Indian libraries to understand the trend in comparison with proprietary systems available. Also examines attitude and perceptions of Indian library community towards adopting OSILS. The challenges confronted by the library community in adopting OSILS and the reasons for migrating to it are also examined. The study found Koha to be a favored OSILS option to which many Indian libraries are migrating. The study also found that acceptance of OSILS in higher education libraries in India is much higher than that of school and public library system where proprietary systems still dominate

Preparing the Ne(x)t Generation: Lessons learnt from Free / Libre Open Source Software Why free and open are pre-conditions and not options for higher

With reference to round table discussions on ‘preparing the new generation’ and ‘renewing knowledge creation’ this paper will illustrate why higher education (HE) needs to reposition itself to be prepared for the ne(x)t generation and which are the lessons to be learnt from well established virtual and informal open participatory learning ecosystems, in particular the Free / Libre Open and Source Software (FLOSS) communities. As has become clear; FLOSS communities succeed in providing and distributing in a sustainable manner the knowledge necessary for the production of good quality software, thereby using a different development approach than proprietary software producers. One characteristic of FLOSS is that it is built by a community of volunteers and frequently backed by companies that generate their revenues by providing services related to FLOSS projects and the software.Peer Reviewe

An Insider's Perspective on the Sakai Project: Reality and Promise for Sustainable Economics and Innovation

In just two short years, the Sakai Project has imperfectly demonstrated the immense potential of the community source model for higher education. We have learned how to pool our resources, run an effective governance, deliver on date-driven development, grow an international community of both not-for-profits and commercial interests, develop a sustainability plan with US$1M cash flow, and most importantly, implement the resulting software at enterprise scale in full production environments. Sakai is providing a unifying community for rapid innovation to support e-learning, e-research, digital libraries and collaboration, but much, much work remains to be done. This session will explain the Sakai Project’s recent history, its future in the hands of the Sakai Foundation, applicability of community source to administrative systems, and assess Sakai’s local impact through implementation at Indiana University.Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR

Assessment of Educational services provided for Prisoners in Rehabilitation Center by Global College, Ambo Campus

Prison education interchangeably used with correctional education, henceforth the educational activities undertaken by persons who are under the supervision of the judiciary with regard to the type of education to be provided in prisons, while some say literacy and numeracy suffice, others insist that educational programs which enable inmates to achieve their full development should be offered. The aim of this study is to make a detail analysis on the perception and satisfaction level of educational services provided by Global College to the prisoners in West Shoa rehabilitation center. A descriptive research design and a qualitative research approach were applied for the study. Data was collected by using both questionnaire and interview from the purposely selected team. Data was analyzed by using SPSS statistical software. The finding of the study indicates that, prisoners were satisfied from the higher education program provided by Global College of Ambo campus in order to change the life of their parents since most of the prisoners were married and unemployed.  The prisoners those completed TVET program continued Degree program and graduated one times. In addition to this Global College graduated TVET program three times in west shoa rehabilitation administration prisoners. Moreover, it is found that Global College is the unique college provided higher education program provided for prisoners. Finally, it is concluded that this college is playing an amazing role on community development activities which can be source of good practice for other government and private institutions found in Ethiopia. Keywords: Prison Education, Global College, Ambo & Ethiopia. DOI: 10.7176/RHSS/12-19-03 Publication date:October 31st 202

Advancing Hyku

This talk is a report on the next stage of development of the Hyku repository platform. Hyku is rapidly developing as both an affordable turnkey alternative to proprietary platforms for small institutions such as bepress, and also as a high-quality cloud-based alternative for large institutions no longer interested in customizing and maintaining open source options. Initially implemented by Duraspace and Stanford University under an IMLS grant, the platform is now being adopted by a growing community and brought to a feature-complete state by four key organizations: CoSector, Notch8, the Texas Digital Library and Ubiquity. This talk will focus in on the work Ubiquity has been involved in, in particular in partnership with the British Library. The acquisition of Bepress in 2017 caused significant distress in the US higher education community (e.g. U. Penn’s Beprexit site). For Ubiquity, Hyku is an opportunity to provide a fully open source, no lock-in alternative to such platforms, which complements its customer charter guaranteeing open source, open access and unbundled products. It chose Hyku because it belongs to the strong Samvera developer community, and committed itself to returning all code to the core codebase. Working with the British Library, Ubiquity has now significantly improved Hyku to the point of market readiness, with support for a full range of content types including data and software, full integration with services such as DataCite, Crossref and ORCiD, full import-export based on open standards, and rich multi-tenancy functionality. Their Hyku instance now holds all British Library research data, of which a quick demo will be given. The goal of this has been to engage customers through trust, rather than lock-in. Customers can leave at any time, continuing to run the containers with their repositories, and in the knowledge that the platform has a large open source community behind it, not just the original service provider

Adoption of the personas technique in the open source software development process

The growth in the number of non-developer open source software (OSS) application users and the escalating use of these applications have led to the need and interest in developing usable OSS. OSS communities do not generally know how to apply usability techniques and are unclear about which techniques to use in each activity of the development process. The aim of our research is to adopt the Personas usability technique in the PSeInt OSS project and determine the feasibility of adapting the technique for application. To do this, we participated as volunteers in the project. We used the case study research method during technique application and participation in the community. As a result, we identified adverse conditions that were an obstacle to technique application and modified the technique to make it applicable. We can conclude from our experience that these changes were helpful for applying the technique, although it was not easy to recruit OSS users to participate in usability technique applicationThis research has been partly funded by several organizations, including the Government of Ecuador’s Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) through a scholarship and the State Technical University of Quevedo through doctoral training scholarships for university professors. Also this research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports FLEXOR and “Realizando Experimentos en la Industria del Software: Comprensión del Paso de Laboratorio a la Realidad” projects (TIN2014-52129-R and TIN2014-60490-P, respectively) and the eMadrid-CM “Investi-gación y Desarrollo de Tecnologías Educativas en la Comunidad de Madrid” project (S2013/ICE-2715

Gravitas, Spring 2007

GravitasSpring2007Newsletter.pdf: 147 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020