Democratising higher education with OERs and FOSS

Dave Lane

https://2019.linux.conf.au/schedule/p...

The Open Education Resource Foundation, based in Dunedin, NZ, exists to make higher education available to everyone in the world at a reasonable cost. We achieve quality by using an open source process to assemble world-class openly-licensed curriculum materials at WikiEducator.org.

We deliver course materials through our OER universitas (https://oeru.org) network, which includes more than 30 institutional partners, using our "next generation digital learning environment" made up entirely of open source online services, situated around the world.

All of our custom development and integration is made available as open source software, and we provide both an open code repository and a "how-to" blog (https://tech.oeru.org) which helps others recreate our services for their own institutions or communities.

My presentation will detail the state of our open source technology stack (it will be built around the content of this blog post: https://tech.oeru.org/2018-update-oer...

The foundation operates on the principle that no learner should have to compromise their freedom to participate in our learning, nor should they have to compromise their digital privacy. To aid that, we use exclusively open source software, and all content is openly available without registration. The only cost to learners is for assessment services for formal academic credit provided by our institutional partners.

linux.conf.au is a conference about the Linux operating system, and all aspects of the thriving ecosystem of Free and Open Source Software that has grown up around it. Run since 1999, in a different Australian or New Zealand city each year, by a team of local volunteers, LCA invites more than 500 people to learn from the people who shape the future of Open Source. For more information on the conference see https://linux.conf.au/

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