Three-quarters of UK colleges and universities have
adopted open source software (OSS) to cut their costs.
The level of OSS take-up in UK higher education is revealed in
research published by national advisory service the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC).
Moodle was the most popular open source system for course
management or virtual learning environments, with 56% of all
colleges now using it.
The Open University intends adopting the Moodle system in the
future, so that system’s take-up is about to increase further.
The research found that 68% of colleges provided the open source
Mozilla Firefox browser on their desktops, usually alongside
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.
The research also found that further education colleges tended
to bring in outside support for the adoption of OSS, while the
universities were more likely to rely on their generally larger
internal IT departments.
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