Development of FOSS Knowledge Bank Repository for Education

This project is funded by the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of IT, under the NRCFOSS-Phase II project.

Background and Aim of the Project

Education is one field where FOSS has contributed to a very large extent in many different ways. This spectrum includes general software resources, software for management of learning and learning institutions, software as learning resources (e.g., simulation tools), and open content.

Unfortunately, these resources are scattered across the internet and are difficult to be tracked down through usual web searches. In general, for most requirements (e.g. content management system, learning management), one can find a variety of solutions. Some of these may be immature and stale with no active development community. Identifying such options is not always easy and is often a time consuming process. Excluding such options, we can generally find multiple good solutions with differing capabilities and technical details. Mapping the various aspects of the solutions to the specific requirements of a user / client is another challenging task. The lack of a committed support community makes this further difficult for end users considering adoption of such solutions. Even getting a comprehensive and unbiased comparative analysis among selected alternatives can be difficult, though some such reports are available for some of the combinations.

The project aims to adopt FOSS solutions for challenging problems for users who are not very technology savvy. A knowledge bank which can provide more direct responses to the kind of questions posed above would be a valuable part of any FOSS ecosystem, and will go a long way in encouraging FOSS adoption.

Deliverables of the Project

Some of the broad deliverables of this project include:

• a comprehensive portal with detailed user-oriented information and comparative studies on various education relevant resources,
• links to other useful resources and articles,
• a framework for building such knowledge banks in other areas,
• specialised search mechanism for gathering information on knowledge bank update,
• creation of metrics for various types of software for education,
• two national level workshops on “FOSS in Education” and
• two courses on popular / related topics using FOSS infrastructure.

Staff Associated:

Sasikumar M

Akshay K

Ankit Dangi

Manoj K Singh