ICTlogy

Abstract:

Beginning with a very brief case study of a free e-learning for development project, the Campus for Peace of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, this paper will try and show how, thanks to the nature of nonprofit organizations, e-learning can solve most of the problems related to corporate training, education for development and e-advocacy for stakeholders. And this paper will try and show also how, just because of the nature of nonprofit organizations too, this can be done for free.

A first part will deal with the free software movement and their point of view that software should be free – free as in free speech, not as in free beer – and have no owners. In this part it will also be explained how this movement, and mainly with the help of Universities all over the world, has entered the world of education and has provided some very interesting solutions such as learning management systems and learning content management systems that can be used for free in any e-learning project under determinate licenses such as GPL.

A second part will deal with the free content movement – not that it really holds this name – and the proliferation of licenses such as Creative Commons’ that allow people and institutions use some contents for free under certain conditions. An interesting application of this content policy and content licenses is in the learning objects field, where there already is a significative development of learning objects repositories, most of them given away to the public commons.

In a third part we will introduce the concept of the online volunteer, its profile, and the main tasks he or she can hold, being the most knowledge intensive ones those that best fit this profile. In fact, it would be stated that the online volunteer is a perfect knowledge management actor and that knowledge transmission is his or her main role. At the end of this part knowledge transmission will be shaped as e-learning and online volunteers will become remote training administrators, online mentors, e-authors, etc.

We will conclude by mixing the three components (technology, content and human resources) to create a free e-learning project model for nonprofits.

Observations: