Traditional brick and mortar schools deal with many challenges such as:

• budget and resource scarcity
• keeping curriculum current and relevant
• security and safety
• and in many cases: recruiting the best students an teachers

For the most part, competition has been between brick and mortar schools thus the playing field was somewhat level. Technology change has created the potential for new tools and models to disrupt brick and mortar delivery of education. This includes eLearning and collaboration.

There are many definitions floating around for eLearning. I'll use the following one as it is concise. eLearning is: "The delivery of a learning, training or education program by electronic means." (Derek Stockley 2003). eLearning provides the potential for education to transcend time and distance. This alone is a significant benefit. For example, one of the academic institutions FOSSLC works with described to us how a large organization sending students to study at their facilities has a policy of sending students home each weekend to spend time with their families. You can appreciate this is very expensive. Even for students not returning home each weekend, cost of accommodation can be a significant part of the costs for their education.

The benefits of eLearning in and of themself are not unique to open source technologies. However, the availability of excellent quality open source pedagological tools ushers in the shift that much sooner. A recent article by Cynthia Harvey entitled: 50 Open Source Apps Transforming Education agrees and notes a long list of open source educational offerings. I will point out that Cynthia mistakenly uses commercial as the opposite of open source - open source can be every bit as commercial as closed source.

Some of the traditional critisisms of eLearning include responsiveness and interactivity with the teacher and fellow students. These limits are quickly being reduced with the presence of excellent software providing multiple ways for the student and teacher to interact. Many of these techniques allow students to interact with each other. These include chat rooms, discussion forums, mailing lists, and more. In my own experience teaching using webcast technology during a lengthy transit strike I found students were able to ask questions real time and interupt my webcast lecture just as in the classroom. The discussion forums for my class took on a life of their own with many hundreds of posts of questions and answers throughout the school term. Some students commented in an anonymous survey that they felt more comfortable asking a "dumb question" in the online interface than they would have in class. Though a bit progressive, my class was still limited to the boundaries of my class attendance at one University. What if the discussion forums were open to multiple institutions or anyone interested?

While trying to learn more about what had been done elsewhere, I found it very interesting in reading some of the body of research on eLearning was that learning style and gender did not seem to be significant factors in eLearning education. This was counter to what I expected. Instead, the reliability of the software and user interface design was far more important. Not surprisingly, some types of education - especially those requiring physical dexterity such as skills a surgeon or mechanic would deal with are not appropriate for eLearning. This makes sense.

Check back with us soon as we'll discuss how the same open source tools and techniques used to develop software are used to develop courses and educational content. We'll also share information about one of our projects to develop an introductory programming course. We believe it is achievable to drive down the costs of education by one or two orders of magnitude without sacrificing learning quality.