Openness builds skills

Last week, the European Commission presented its targets to achieve a digital decade for Europe. This event made one thing clear: Digital skills are key for Europe’s digital transformation. The freedoms inherent in open source software encourage individuals to not only consume software but to be an active participant in its creation, its further development and maintenance. This puts people in a fundamentally different position, with clear advantages.

Enabling the openness, accessibility and modularity of digital infrastructures is the key to transforming COVID-19 into an opportunity to foster the development of digital skills. This month, the OSOR team wants to highlight the unique way in which open source can contribute to increasing digital skills, especially in education, and how open source tools can help mitigate the effects of COVID-19.

To help fuel the development of innovative education tools, the Greek Open Technologies Alliance (GFOSS) has organised a competition calling on education institutions, from kindergarten to secondary schools, to develop open source software and hardware tools to address major challenges faced by society. This year’s theme is Artificial Intelligence, and all entrants to the competition have submitted their solutions and supporting educational material on GitHub. By using open source, participants get to reuse existing open source software and hardware, improve on it, and therefore learn important digital skills.

Over 200 schools in south-eastern France run on Elementary OS, a GNU/Linux-based operating system. The system allows students to learn how to navigate digital technologies. Since the operating system is open source, pupils get to know software that they can actively help develop toward their needs, learning the flexibility of digital systems. This follows the recent publication of a French report on the state of open source software in higher education. The report calls for more collaboration and clarity in open source practices in academia and research, and increased recognition of the role of open source in education and its potential to support digital skills.

Meanwhile, in Finland, a group of education tool developers have established Koulu.me to help teachers and secondary school students at risk of being unable to access education remotely. The platform offers free education resources and teaching materials to help secondary school students with the transition to remote learning. One prominent open source solution on the platform is Mehackit Atelier, which offers teaching courses for diverse subjects such as art, music, and coding. 

Open source solutions have proven to be essential in easing the transition from the traditional school environment to remote learning and building digital skills. Further innovation in this sector will be needed to continue supporting students in these challenging times. Over the years, OSOR has highlighted many examples of open source solutions in the education sector and will continue to report on further developments.

The OSOR Team