Hi Ian, Thanks for this information. Accrediting is really an important point. Certification will be another one. Currently we have (as far as I know) three schools in Singapore that started in february 07 with the first book. At the moment I need more schools to get more feedback about the content. I'm just the author of the books and I want to push them because: - Linux is great. - Education is a very important market. - The books are good. - I like the project very much, because it is my baby. I'm not a salesman and not a marketing guy. My problems are: - I'm responsible for a lot of other (non-academic) training materials. - Most of my colleagues focus on developing/selling trainings, they can earn (more) money with. - I don't come from the academic market and so I have just a few contacts to academics. - I don't have any budgets. At the moment it is something like a one man show. It's my show. And if there will come another high-priority training next week, I have to interrupt the show. That's the sadly truth. In January 08 I will finish the third book. I don't know what will be after. I need some "success stories", requests and kit sales till the end of next year. I've some other ideas for academic trainings based on Linux, I don't know whether there will be a chance to realize (some of) them. Michael On Fri, Jun 01, Ian Lynch wrote:

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

-- Michael Eicks, Linux Curriculum Developer Novell Global Training Services Novell GmbH, Alt Moabit 91c, 10559 Berlin, Germany Tel: +49-40-890646-44, E-Mail: michael.eicks@novell.com Novell GmbH, GF: Volker Smid, Djamel Souici, HRB 21108 (AG Duesseldorf)

Will these texts themselves be "open source"? i.e. if I wanted to use them for teaching my kids, do I have to pay someone? Jonathon M. Robison ET, ITI "There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who know binary, and those who don't" -----Original Message----- From: James Tremblay [mailto:jamesat@comcast.net] Sent: Friday, June 01, 2007 7:44 AM To: opensuse-edu@opensuse.org Subject: Re: [opensuse-edu] Linux School Curriculum On Friday 01 June 2007 04:09, 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!

Michael Welcome Michael, We are greatfull for every ounce of participation. I love the idea of a technical curriculum surrounding SLED, when I get my desktops converted I will certainly be asking the teaching arm of my department to include this.

It looks like your writing a "prequell" to the CLP course, It would definitely be a good Idea to get it accredited. It might even take the place of Novell's course 3036 Linux fundamentals. -- James Tremblay Director of Technology Newmarket School District Novell CNE 3\4\5 CLE \ NCE in training. http://en.opensuse.org/education -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-edu+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-edu+help@opensuse.org

Hi James, The curriculum (called "Get Ready for Open Source") is designed as a developer course. At the moment, we plan to introduce Mono/C# as programming language in book 3. CLP and the fundamentals course (the new number is 3071, based on SLES10) focus on administration. In the schoolbooks there is only a short part about administration. Michael On Fri, Jun 01, James Tremblay wrote:

Welcome Michael, We are greatfull for every ounce of participation. I love the idea of a technical curriculum surrounding SLED, when I get my desktops converted I will certainly be asking the teaching arm of my department to include this.

It looks like your writing a "prequell" to the CLP course, It would definitely be a good Idea to get it accredited. It might even take the place of Novell's course 3036 Linux fundamentals. -- James Tremblay Director of Technology Newmarket School District Novell CNE 3\4\5 CLE \ NCE in training. http://en.opensuse.org/education

-- Michael Eicks, Linux Curriculum Developer Novell Global Training Services Novell GmbH, Alt Moabit 91c, 10559 Berlin, Germany Tel: +49-40-890646-44, E-Mail: michael.eicks@novell.com Novell GmbH, GF: Volker Smid, Djamel Souici, HRB 21108 (AG Duesseldorf)