Section 12.4. OSS in Education

12.4. OSS in Education

Despite its IT prowess, India lags behind in contributing to large-scale OSS projects. It also lags behind in the use of OSS in the educational curriculum at all levels. Nonetheless, OSS is viewed by many in Indian industry and government as a key for improving the quality of education.

The enthusiasm for OSS in education is still in its infancy, since India's secondary school curriculum is today oriented toward proprietary products such as Microsoft Office, Windows applications, and development environments like Visual Basic and database applications like SQL Server and Oracle. In the curriculum, there is little support for generic computing concepts or platform-neutral software applications.

But there are exceptions, where FOSS advocates have worked with local school administrations to teach computing concepts using open tools and development environments.

More significantly, industry players such as Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and Intel have initiated open source resource centers and internship programs to grow the talent pool of open source engineering in India. Intel, in conjunction with the Department of Information Technology, has established an Open Source Resource Center to promote ICT education and curriculum development. IBM and the C-DAC have created an Open Source Software Resource Center (OSSRC) in Mumbai to foster OSS development, to increase understanding of OSS models, and to develop courseware which promotes OSS skills and builds a national OSS talent pool. Red Hat has launched a scholarship program with IIT Bombay to encourage OSS development skills. Novell has started an OSS internship program to boost student participation and contributions from India in OSS projects such as Mozilla, GNOME, and OpenOffice.