Teach your students to fish
Open source in the classroom
Taylor Jadin & Amanda Schmidt
Who we are
Amanda Schmidt
Instructional Support Specialist
Taylor Jadin
Community Instructional Technologist
What is open source?
Free
Community
Ownership
Open source like... what?
VLC media player (cross-platform)
QuickTime Player (macOS)
Windows Media Player (Windows)
Proprietary
Proprietary
Open source
Using open source tools in the classroom not only gives students and teachers control over their data and tools, but can help them cultivate digital skills.
Exhibit A
R / R Studio vs. SPSS
The tools in action...
SPSS
- Labs involved following packets of instructions
- Instructions were many pages long and extremely detailed to allow students to follow along
R / R Studio
- Students needed to learn how to:
- Set up R Studio
- Read R code, and understand the syntax
- Find help via online resources
- Labs started with code samples that students would modify
How is open source enabling this impact?
- It's free!
- R = programming language with built-in ecosystem and community
- SPSS = product incentivized to never change and maintain customer base
Exhibit B
WordPress
vs.
Wix / Squarespace / Weebly
The scenario:
You want to ask your students to build an e-portfolio and are choosing which platform they do it in.
Wix / Weebly / Squarespace
- How do you prepare students to use these?
- What do they end up with after completing their portfolio?
- a website, that stays on the platform
By Vector Market on thenounproject.com
WordPress
- How do you prepare students to use this?
- What do they end up with after completing their portfolio?
- a website that they own and control, can bring with them, and have learned about how websites work (contextualizing the technology / they’ve built a skill)
By Juicy Fish on thenounproject.com