3 biggest benefits of open source in education

Open source software is making its way into education.

Even though using open source software for educational purposes is nothing new, we observe an increased demand for it across higher education institutions.

Why now, and why such a surge in interest?
Well, there is hardly any industry that didn’t experience an impact made by the pandemic. The conclusion across the board is almost unanimous: the future is digital, and it’s approaching us at a greater speed than ever before.

The effect on education as a whole was profound. Schools and universities abruptly switched to online education models. As time went on, everybody realized that digital education has numerous benefits. 

However, it was also shown that further investments need to be made to facilitate digital transformation in schools and universities. With limited funds and capacity, one thing became clear: open source software is a great solution to specific challenges in digitalizing education.

Why does higher education need open source software?

Digital transformation has been one of the key cross-industrial trends in the last decade. In higher education, digital transformation has been a long-standing effort to improve the learning and teaching experience.

The scope of universities’ digital transformation includes:

• Streamlining the admission process
• Upgrading EdTech
• Digitalizing teaching and learning methodologies
• Improving accessibility and access to higher education
• Personalized learning
• Better learning outcomes, and more.

The need for the digital transformation of public higher education institutions is evident in government funds allocation. Namely,the German government’s digital school pact secured €6.5 billion in funds to improve education industries’ digital structure.

However, several challenges make it more difficult for higher education institutions to speed up their digital transformation:

• High data security and privacy standards
• Complex nature of universities’ systems
• High cost of proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in.

It turns out that open source software is a great solution to these challenges and is why higher education institutions are using more open source solutions than ever.

Benefits of utilizing open source software in education

Open source technology is applied in various EdTech solutions due to its specific benefits. All of open source software advantages arise from its transparency. Namely, what defines open source software is its publicly available code - everyone can see it, inspect it, and contribute to it.

1. Flexibility

A big challenge that universities have when it comes to digital transformation is the complexity and uniqueness of their systems. From a technological point of view, this makes it harder for universities to adopt technologies that are not built with their specific requirements in mind.

Moreover, almost 70% of public sector employees believe that their digital skills are poorer than those of their private-sector colleagues, making them harder to adapt to completely new systems.

Since open source software is free to inspect and use, it can also be easily modified to match the exact needs of its users. This is often of critical importance to universities whose complex IT infrastructure requires a high level of flexibility when adding new solutions.

Moreover, the scalability of open source software makes it easier for universities to test it or use it on a smaller scale and then increase the number of users or functionalities when the need arises.

Moreover, the scalability of open source software makes it easier for universities to test it or use it on a smaller scale and then increase the number of users or functionalities when the need arises. This in turn allows newer students to access solid work-study functionalities directly related to the university when they're paying for college.

2. Security

As mentioned above, open source software has publicly available code. This means that it’s available for everyone to see and inspect.

Open source community members then gladly intervene in the code and suggest changes to it. A lot of times, the suggestions make the app more secure.

All in all, open source software has the whole community behind its back as contributors. For example, more than 700 people contributed to Rocket.Chat’s code on GitHub.

Why is this important? Because the frequency of cyberattacks on universities is increasing. In 2020, when teaching and learning completely switched online for a while, the average cost of a ransomware attack aimed at universities was almost $500,000.

Moreover, with the introduction of GDPR, European businesses and universities alike have had to adapt to stricter data privacy regulations. 

More and more companies are looking for self-deployment options to ensure complete data sovereignty, thus facilitating data protection.

3. Cost-effectiveness

The cost of open source software varies, but it is cheaper than proprietary software as a rule of thumb. Users usually opt for free trials or install community versions of the software at hand, which is usually free. This gives higher education institutions a good insight into how a specific open source software would fit into their complex infrastructure.

Furthermore, open source software customization can be done in-house and doesn’t have to be expensive. On the other hand, proprietary software vendors usually charge extra for customization.

Last but not least, open source software users avoid vendor lock-in. This is a situation where universities become dependent on a vendor for products and services and can’t get out of a deal with them, yet the vendor can increase the price of their services.