Luxembourg : FLOSS, a challenge for Education
In Technical High School "School of Business and Management" in Luxembourg, we have a project since 2007/2008. Main objective is to show by practical experience that the free libre software can be useful in Education.
Free libre software allow students to prepare at home in a legal way. Students and teachers can use free libre software and promote equal opportunities for students regardless of their financial situation.
Our project includes the development of course materials, intervention with National Commissions for the adaptation of curricula, the organization of internal training, etc.
We use including but not limited to OpenOffice.org. The year 2007/2008 has shown in several pilot classes that use free libre software is possible without requiring a complete overhaul of computer science courses.
Problems were also encountered. For example in the teaching of databases we still face obstacles due to some weaknesses of the OOo’s Base module.
Currently we try to generalize the use of FLOSS in the computer course and start to use it in the teaching of management’s quantitative techniques in some pilot classes.
To "Libre Software Meeting" we will present our experiences and findings of 2007/2008 and 2008/2009