FLOSS4Edu:AboutFLOSS4Edu

About FLOSS4Edu

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FLOSS4Edu Initiative is part of WikiEducator, started with support from Commonwealth of Learning after a study that was conducted on eLearning Practioners in Africa in an attempt to highlight and address some of their problems in the area of access to Educational Resources and Information and Communication Technology Access. You can see the report on this particular study here.

Through discussions with stakeholders in a meeting held in November, 2006 in Nairobi-Kenya, FLOSS4Edu was launched with the Vision of:

By 2009 to make available to 100 Educational Institutions relevant Free and Open Source Software Solutions for Education while building the largest community of Educators working together towards the development of Open Education Resources

See the report for the first workshop here.

The FLOSS4Edu Community is working towards addressing the following needs:

• Absence of Free and Open Educational Content for Educational Institutions
• The lack of valuable skills and knowledge to use FLOSS and OER technologies
• Lack of access to existing FLOSS resources caused by high bandwidth costs and the absence of alternative FLOSS distributions channels

Inline with the vision of FLOSS4Edu, several milestones have been achieved so far. These includes:

• Development of over 100 lessons as OERs available here
• Establishment of Expert groups from various Educational Institutions working together on Content Development in areas of Expertise
• Implementation of five(5) capacity building workshops in various regions in Africa. See report on FLOSS4Edu Capacity Building Workshops here
• Establishment of regional FLOSS4Edu Chapters spanning across various regions of the world.See FLOSS4Edu Regional Chapters

The FLOSS4Edu Initiative strategy revolves around the following principles:

• Capacity Building in support of Educational Practitioner Skills to develop Open Educational Resources and use WikiEducator
• Establishing relevant collaborations and alliances to create synergies in digital content development with special emphasis on the use of social software
• Develop innovative open source software solutions addressing access and participation gaps for educational practitioners in the developing countries
• Advocacy and Promotion through participation in policy formulation forums and interaction with key decision makers at the National, Regional and Global level
• Establishment of communities of expert groups working together in the development of OER's in a collaborative manner

FLOSS4Edu needs you to help in refining its strategy towards achieving its broad vision. Share your thoughts by subscribing to our mailing list or you can send an email to nicholas at wikieducator dot org (replace the at with @ and the dot with .)

You can also participate in the WikiEducator and FLOSS4Edu community by:

• Sharing your experiences e.g the Agricultural OER group experiences - African Open Agricultural Education Resources (OAER) Experiences
• Sharing your biographies with other Folks in the community in the Community Members Portal