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.

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.

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.

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.

Having had much involvement myself with delivering e-seminars online, I've come to closely track the fast-growing world of online learning (e-learning). It's becoming a huge business, with big publishing companies such as CNet offering free online courses, and top universities such as U.C. Berkeley offering free webcasts and podcasts to the public. 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. Did you know that one of the biggest players in software and platforms for e-learning is a free, open source offering? If not, meet Moodle.

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