Pravab

The education secretariat of Parana developed a web portal using F/LOSS and this system was also released as F/LOSS. This web portal was in Portuguese language. This system enables the educators from public sector to work together and develop course contents for different fields. In 2006, it had over 300 materials published for education sector. This web portal doesn’t only help the education sector in Brazil, but for all the people who understand Portuguese. It has a great hand in contributing to Portuguese contents on the internet (Apikul, 2006). This system offers educators an environment where they can effectively collaborate and develop course content. Before publishing the materials, to maintain quality, it is checked by another team of experts. This way not only the knowledge is shared among the educators but also the experience.  The web portal works on low speed internet connection. There is an offline version of this system available as well so that even people who ...

Istituto Statale di Istruzione Superiore J.M. Keynes (ISISJMKeynes) School, Italy in late 1990s’ implemented the F/LOSS based ICT and the decision making body for this was composed of teachers, students, parents as well as the non teaching staffs. ISISJMKeynes School after implementing F/LOSS not only witnessed the reduced cost but they also experienced the application customisation based on their specific educative needs.  The user’s contribution to F/LOSS has made them work alongside with the developers and has also strengthened the relationship between the users themselves, i.e. the relationship between students and students, teachers and teachers and more importantly the relationship between teachers and students. The F/LOSS based ICT has helped the school promote better and interactive learning environment (Lin and Zini, 2008). Along with F/LOSS ICT, the use of open content was also engaged for the daily educative purposes (Lin and Zini, 2008). Open content is a continuou...

ICT plays an important role in education sector as it helps increase the quality of the education provided and also facilitates the delivery of business objectives (MCEETYA, 2003) but education sector faces financial constraints along with sharing the resources for other things. Education sector has hence not been able to get the full benefit of ICT (Tong, 2004). Digitisation has already captured and transformed the educations industry.  To catch up with it, education sector requires an ICT infrastructure and to compete with the rest of the world they have to rely on proprietary software vendors. It becomes more expensive for the education sector to use proprietary software while they are already dealing with the financial constraints (Lakhan and Jhunjhunwala, 2008). With the introduction of F/LOSS though, the ICT cost can be highly reduced and higher quality of education can be provided (Tong, 2004).  F/LOSS is available free from the internet and is also available in CD...