Comprehensive Research On Instructional Use Of Open Source Software

Open source software ( OSS ), a new model in the software industry, is paid more and more attention in recent years, which can provide software users the free high-quality software products and the freedom of using, redistributing and modifying software. At present, many organizations including governments and enterprises throughout the world have benefited a lot from open source software such as Linux and Apache.The characteristics of OSS such as open source, free of charge, easy to customize and localize completely accord with needs of education organizations. It has become a kind of cost-effective solution to use OSS in many education institutions and schools over the world. Now OSS is being extensively applied for the campus net services, teaching and management.Though education informatization in China develops fast in recent years, there are some disadvantages existing such as lack of the awareness of protecting intellectual property, overflowing in software privation, seriously relying on overseas commercial software and so on, which makes the education in China not having the software infrastructure with the character of self-independence, stability and credibility, easy-using and scalability , hold back the education informatization from further developing .The treatise puts the main focus on the application of open source software in the field of education, especially the application in course teaching and teaching management. In course teaching, the treatise notes that it is feasible to use open source software in the IT teaching of K-12 schools through analyzing existing OSS and IT courses in K-12 schools, and designs a content framework of high school IT course; in teaching management, the treatise tries to take Moodle in practice in a postgraduate course and analyzes its advantage and disadvantage through collecting and comparing the existing open source LMS.By way of research at the two aspects of course teaching and teaching management, the treatise draws the outline of source software applied in the whole teaching domain. Moreover, in order to possess stronger guidance to the readers, the treatise further discusses the transition strategy of schools software infrastructure from commercial software to OSS and gives out a case of an abroad school.