Open Source software for Online Teaching in the times of Corona

As schools and universities have been shutting down around the globe, many of us in academia are wondering how we can get up to speed and to establish a stable workflow that allows us to get our podcasts, on-line lectures and tutorials out there for our students. In this post I provide a subjective list of open source tools that I am using.

There are at least two reasons why open source has a key role to play in the current situation:

  • OSS is easy to roll out quickly and in large numbers (e.g. to an army of teaching assistants for multiple tutorial session in big lectures) , without any licensing issues and in a decentralized manner.
  • OSS is cheap . Actually it’s free. Hence, no need for financially stretched schools and universities to spend heaps of non-budgeted money on proprietary software at very short notice.

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Installing Linux Mint (or Ubuntu) on a Dell Precision 5530

I firmly believe that using open source software is an important prerequisite for reproducible and accessible research. We cannot expect others (think e.g. students or researchers in developing countries) to buy super-expensive software to reproduce research. We should also make sure that the code we use, including the applications we run the code on, are … Read more