Hello,
https://blogs.fsfe.org/vitaly_repin/2015/05/04/road-to-free-digital-society-...
We launched first iteration of this course today. I will be happy to receive any feedback now and during the course.
I want to empasize that Eliademy iteration is just one iteration of the course. The course itself is freely redistributable and I hope it will be used by other organizations. Including university and school teachers - they will be able to use these materials to educate theie students about Free Digital Society in general and FOSS in particular.
I am now finalizing the quizzes for the course. Is it a proper place to get your feedback about the quizzes?
If yes, I would be happy to post them here. They will contain answers and this is the reason I can not discuss quizzes in a wide audience. But it would be great to discuss them with other FSFE fellow, I believe.
On Monday 4. May 2015 16.29.18 Vitaly Repin wrote:
Hello,
https://blogs.fsfe.org/vitaly_repin/2015/05/04/road-to-free-digital-society -new-mooc-is-launched/
We launched first iteration of this course today. I will be happy to receive any feedback now and during the course.
Congratulations!
I want to empasize that Eliademy iteration is just one iteration of the course. The course itself is freely redistributable and I hope it will be used by other organizations. Including university and school teachers - they will be able to use these materials to educate theie students about Free Digital Society in general and FOSS in particular.
Just taking the discussion in perhaps another direction than you anticipated, it seems that Eliademy (why do modern brand names have to be so awful?) isn't itself a Free Software platform, which is a shame, and I think that's what you're acknowledging above. In the various education sectors, there's a big push to introduce "e-learning" platforms and other cloud-based services, and there's a lot of unhappiness [1] with many of them.
Indeed, some big players (Microsoft, Pearson) have a lot to lose by not "acquiring" customers (or retaining them in Microsoft's case) who want to either manage their existing courses online or to offer online courses and materials, and a lot of smaller players see opportunities to sell services, often proprietary ones, to those shopping around. Meanwhile, many of the above live in fear of Apple, believe it or not, anticipating some kind of iTunes or App Store product to attract influential brand fanatics and to subvert the usual procurement processes.
To give an example of the risks to free and open platforms, Microsoft are in the process of sewing up the Norwegian higher education sector with their Office 365 and related offerings, with all the inherent competition, privacy and control issues that will result. The latter issues are waved away as paranoia, unbelievably, whereas Microsoft are probably still imposing a Windows tax at some level or other in the Norwegian education sector, albeit not now so brazenly (as in the way Microsoft and Intel colluded before their illegal bundling practices were curtailed, at least in the US).
Anyway, I hope that your course gets a wide distribution on sustainable e- learning platforms, too. :-)
Paul
[1] http://idaaa.no/2009/05/15/itslearning-vi-trenger-ikke-bry-oss-om- brukerne-sa-lenge-vi-tjener-penger/ (requires Norwegian knowledge, but can probably be automatically translated with some success)