OStatic

Dimdim, an open source web conferencing provider that we've covered many times, launched what it is billing as an easy webinar service today. Dimdim has long competed closely with proprietary web conferencing services such as WebEx, and its new service will provide personalized webinar platforms for webinars delivered to up to 1,000 people. In conjunction with the new service, Dimdim has struck a partnership with Eventbrite, which does event management and ticketing, so that anyone delivering webinars can find avenues to make money with them.

We've reported before on how big universities such as U.C. Berkeley, as well as publishing companies such as CNet have used the open source Moodle platform to deliver e-learning content online. M.I.T.'s Open Courseware site, and its M.I.T. World video effort, are also notable for providing excellent, free educational content online. Meanwhile, the United States is the single largest e-learning market worldwide with revenues exceeding $17.5 billion in 2007, according to a report from Global Industry Analysts. Now, U.C. Berkeley is funding the development of an open source project for expanded distribution of free recordings of lectures and other events, as the San Francisco Business Times reports. There are other notable free e-learning initiatives underway, too.

We've written about free e-learning resources and tools, such as Moodle, several times here on OStatic, as well as collections of open source tutorials. Many universities are picking up on the fact that it is easy to use free, open source tools such as Moodle to provide classes online that anyone can take. U.C. Berkeley provides free online classes based on Moodle, and M.I.T. has a collection of over 1,900 free courses on its MITOpenCourseware site, many on tech topics. MITWorld also has a searchable database of free, educational videos. Here are some notable examples of classes and seminars that may be of interest to you.

Though today's piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education is less about the advantages of open source courseware and more about the advantages that open source courseware has suddenly been given, it's worth taking a few moments to read and consider.

The leading proprietary course management system, Blackboard, announced this month that it was purchasing another of its major competitors. Many Angel Learning clients said they chose the company because of its low-key approach and helpful customer service, coupled with the open nature of at least portions of its source code.

It's an area where software preferences -- not necessarily in regards to open or closed code, but service, features, and responsiveness to client needs -- are not simply a matter of favorites. As the Chronicle explains, the course management system isn't just a platform for managing coursework, schedules, and grades. It's an extension of the school.

Where Blackboard has seemingly fallen short, where Angel Learning excelled, and how this acquisition is being received has resulted in many educational institutions giving open source alternatives a much closer look.

We've covered free e-learning resources and tools, such as Moodle, several times here on OStatic, as well as collections of open source tutorials. E-learning is a very fast-growing field, and open source tools and principles dovetail nicely with it. For example, U.C. Berkeley provides free online courses based on Moodle. While the free, open courseware you'll find in this exhaustive list isn't specific to open source, there are some excellent resources that people in the open source community can get access to for free. Here are a few gems I found in the list of over 100 resources.

Last week, Moodlerooms announced that it had teamed with Google to integrate the Google Apps for Education service into Moodle.

This allows students and faculty using the open source Moodle learning platform to access all of Google's educational tools and applications, as well as the Moodle system, with a single sign on. Even more significantly, it simplifies managing and maintaining network collaboration tools, and allows students to access the system and get working on any computer that has a browser.

Today brings a couple of new announcements on how open source software tools are pushing forward in the online education and educational collaboration markets. Fresh on the heels of news of its hookup with Dimdim, a maker of open source conferencing software, Zimbra has announced a new hosted set of services focused on schools. In other news, Wimba, which makes collaboration tools for education, is in a partnership involving the popular open source e-learning platform Moodle. Here are the details.

Open source software encourages learning, the exchange of knowledge and information, and project improvements that rely as much on its users, and its developers' colleagues, as it does the developer. It's not unlike education. Ideally, learning is a continuous cycle of taking in, processing, and giving back, with modifications.

It's puzzling, then, that the adoption of open source software has been relatively slow, even in higher education. However, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, open source course management software is starting to gain a foothold.

Google and O'Reilly have announced the winners of the 2008 Google-O'Reilly Open Source Awards. Hat tip to Matt Asay for calling this out. I was very pleased to see one of the people behind Moodle named one of the winners. We've written widely about it. These awards, by the way, recognize special people in the open source community, not just projects. Here, below the fold, are the winners.

We've covered Moodle before. It's one of the biggest players in software and platforms for e-learning (online seminars, webinars and the like) and it's also free and open source. Now, Infinity Learning Solutions has announced a cloud computing solution for Moodle leveraging the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform. The move may let interested parties--such as the many universities that use Moodle--deliver high-end e-learning content, such as streaming video classes. They're also likely to be able to deliver such content without facing high costs.