Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (37 mails)

[Ian Lynch <ian.lynch@xxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 10:09 +0200, Michael Eicks wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just found your project and subscribed immediately.
> 
> It seems, we have the same goals, but we focus on different products.
> 
> I'm writing a school curriculum for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.
> Two of three books are already finished. More information about these
> school books, you can find at
> 
> http://www.novell.com/partners/training/academic/sled.html
> 
> Maybe we can work together? Let's think about it!

You might also be interested in accrediting such work. Certainly in the
UK you have very little chance of mass take up of work not related to
the Statutory Curriculum and providing official accreditation makes take
up much more likely as well as providing a revenue stream. Take a look
at www.openquals.org.uk and put TLM in the search. We are TLM (The
Learning Machine) a UK government accredited Awarding Body with
qualifications accredited for use in schools that have been designed to
be compatible with the National Curriculum in the UK but also to be
flexible enough for international use. We have a project to develop in
South Africa in partnership with the Shuttleworth Foundation and
partners in Germany, Portugal, Romania, Poland, Turkey, USA, Australia
and New Zealand. We have endorsement from the UK sector skills council
for IT and telecommunications and we plan to get further endorsement by
governments in other countries starting with South Africa.

So far we have certificates that cover each level in the UK national
qualifications framework from special needs education to Level 2 (Top
half of the age 16 attainment range) and we plan to support Level 3 as a
natural progression to university entrance level. Our certification is
wider than just GNU-Linux. It covers issues related to intellectual
property, ISO standards and social networking and is designed to take
students and their teachers from where they are now (Mostly using
Windows) to where we want them to be (able to make informed decisions
about the technologies they use). So we don't insist on them changing
their technology at the outset, we educate them to make that change when
it is sensible for them to do so. We plan to use revenue from the
certification to commission web based learning applications that conform
to open standards and are freely available to schools. One the
curriculum is systematically supported by free internet based resources
there is no reason not to use free software infrastructure especially
when the users are educated about why. It will take some time to get to
this point since we have to grow at the rate revenues from the project
support investment but we have done probably the most difficult part
which is setting up a government approved awarding body from scratch,
getting the certificates approved and getting sufficient schools
participating to finance the development of the web site. Growth should
be easy now ;-)

Ian
-- 
New QCA Accredited IT Qualifications
www.theINGOTs.org

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