The British Open University took upon itself in 2005, together with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the task of bringing online learning into the future. Unusual is that it didn't decide on Moodle for merely financial reasons or that it didn't go for professional support.

Moodle is a free and very useful course management system that facilitates the teaching of online classes to all age groups--elementary, middle, high school, and college--as well as organizations and corporations.

Moodle, the e-learning system, is one of the most significant and successful projects in open source. Despite its success, with hundreds of thousands of people taught by courses written in Moodle, as a product it is not well known

In a recently published decision (PDF file), the US patent office has declared US company Blackboard’s e-learning patent invalid. The patent office rejected all 44 claims in the disputed US patent number 6,988,138, (“Alcorn patent”) for a system for teaching in a virtual classroom using the internet, including chat, a virtual blackboard and provision of teaching materials.

It's now possible for public school districts in California (and maybe Iowa) to acquire decent Free Open Source Software computers, courtesy of Microsoft. The purpose of this article is to lay out the basic process involved, because the documentation available on the official websites is murky, at best. Hopefully this article will summarize the process a bit.

Oregon State University, [] was just named one of the nation’s “10 Really Cool University Networking Labs” by Network World, an information technology magazine. The recognition cites several of the lab’s features, especially its focus on open source software, which is freely available to anyone to download, use, adapt and pass on to others.

The virtual learning environment could be where university libraries first encounter open source. An increasing number of content management and portal systems are also open source and many university libraries are involved in setting up open source repositories. As acceptance of open source grows, the next step will be to consider open source solutions for the core integrated library system.

Moodle is a software package for producing Internet-based courses and web sites. Moodle 2.0 contains a lot of large new features, some completely rewritten features, and hundreds of bug fixes.

Over the last few months, open source has gained momentum at Stanford University in the form of the Stanford Open Source Lab. Inspired by groups like the Free Software Foundation, Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab, Drupal, Openflows Community Technology Lab, and MIT’s Open Course Ware, a few people at Stanford decided to band together and dedicate their time and energies to the development of free/open/libre learning and knowledge resources.