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# "What it means to be a school is now up for grabs."
- URL: https://werd.io/means-school-grabs/
- Published: 2011-09-20T00:54:19.000Z
- Updated: 2025-06-12T11:00:45.000Z
- Author: Ben Werdmuller
- Tags: General, #ben-684a32da145d7d001be71dae, blackboard, education, elearning, learning, learning management systems, open source, stephen downes, #Migrated-1749693130536, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2025-06-11 21:52

[![Learner](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/70/185925362_7e9a9c284d.jpg)](http://www.flickr.com/photos/benwerd/185925362/)

Education, for me, is still the most exciting field that open source is opening up. It's a vital part of any civilized society, and so it seems right that the software that helps participants teach and learn should be open. I have no qualms about charging private institutions like Stanford, say, the six figure license fees that some educational software platforms demand - but for tax-funded institutions, these costs and restrictions are unethical. Even for moneyed institutions like Stanford, open source software has built-in feature advantages that commercial or SaaS packages can't match.

[The Tyee, a site covering British Columbia, discovers the movement:](http://thetyee.ca/Life/2011/09/15/Open-Source-Teaching/)

> [Stephen Downes](http://downes.ca/)

Well, quite. Education isn't just another enterprise market. It's one that all of our economies, livelihoods and lifestyles depend on. Far too important for a significant aspect of the process to be handed over to any one company and locked away in a proprietary system (particularly [one that actively sues other vendors, doesn't fix its own bugs in a timely fashion and charges dramatically over-the-odds fees for its services](http://www.blackboard.com/)).

There's still some work to be done on open source business models for education. People who write software need it to pay their bills for it to be a sustainable endeavor, and most teachers are too overworked to be building software themselves on the side. I think some upcoming server-side products will go some way towards fixing that, and make life easier for educators in the process.