Towards Community-Driven Development of Educational Materials: The Edukalibre Approach

The libre software development model has shown how combining collective intelligence can lead to revolutionary methods that underpin major software advancements. This paper argues that the time is ripe to examine the application of this model to the development of educational materials where not only teachers but also students can become actively involved in the creation of educational content. The paper describes a novel, truly open platform, developed within the Edukalibre project, to support the creation of collaboratively constructed educational materials. The paper presents the Edukalibre collaborative editing system that provides easy access to core technologies composed of a document repository with version control management and conversion tools to produce several formats for each document. Two different collaborative editing interfaces – COLLAB and ConDOR – have been implemented. Based on evaluation studies with COLLAB and ConDOR, we discuss several pedagogical and technological issues related to the deployment of community-driven development of educational content.

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