A university created with and based on new technologies, the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
(Open University of Catalonia, UOC) could hardly ignore this state of affairs. Thus, and with a
view to meeting growing demand from a number of students, the UOC has made a workspace based on
free software available, so that students can now choose which platform they use to access and work
in the university’s Virtual Campus. The project began in the last academic year with a pilot
test aimed at the UOC’s 7,000 IT diploma students. The outcome was highly satisfactory and
the initiative has consequently been extended to all the students on the university’s
official courses in Catalan and Spanish in the current academic year.
The workspace based on free software is in keeping with the UOC’s policy of
“providing people with all the resources possible in order for ICT to become part of their
everyday life”, according to Pedro Mingueza, director of Technological Infrastructures and
the project’s coordinator. He says that it is thus guaranteed “that everyone uses
whichever tools they prefer, without their options being restricted as a result of a particular
platform having been selected for access purposes”. Josep Jorba, the lecturer in charge of
the Operating Systems subject, explains that “there are no new advantages or disadvantages to
working in a free software environment; it’s rather a matter of working with alternative
tools”.
At the beginning of the present academic year, the UOC sent the more than 34,000 students on
its official courses in Catalan and Spanish a DVD that enables them to log on to the Virtual Campus
and work in a free software environment. “The DVD contains a distribution called DVD autònom
[stand-alone DVD], which allows students to use the GNU/Linux operating system via the DVD itself,
without having to install any software on their PC. Nonetheless, if they’re comfortable with
the idea and using free software appeals to them, they can install the operating system on their
computer’s hard drive in a very straightforward manner”, explains Sergio Pérez, a
Technological Infrastructures analyst responsible for the technical aspects of the development of
the workspace based on free software. He goes on to say that the stand-alone DVD “has been
assembled on the basis of the Ubuntu 7.04 distribution, on to which all the software necessary to
study the UOC’s courses has been installed. The university’s corporate image has been
added to it and a metapackage system created for its maintenance”.
Some may find the concept more complicated than others, but the fact is that 70% of the
students who took part in the pilot test in the last academic year found the experience
satisfactory. Carles Solanas was among them. Aged 32, from Tarragona, he is studying on a Systems
IT diploma course at the UOC and describes himself as a fan of anything related to computers.
“I’d already used GNU/Linux some time ago”, Carles explains, “but the pilot
test made me want to use it again, as I wasn’t familiar with Ubuntu and I realised that it
wasn’t like the first versions of GNU/Linux, which were far more complicated”. He is of
the opinion that such initiatives “are very positive”.
Vicent Cubells is one of the students who began to use the workspace based on free software
during the current academic year. He says that he decided to do so because “at the UOC
we’ve made two mistakes with regard to free software. Using proprietary software for
subjects, thus preventing students from getting to know any other type of software and
unconsciously obliging them to use it at home, was the first. Using proprietary formats for
communicating via the Campus was the second. The free software workspace has made it possible for a
lot of people to find out about such software, which encourages them to collaborate”. Vicent
has been very satisfied with the free software over the few months in which it has been in use.
“I’ve always said that if a user can be persuaded to switch to free software,
that’s good enough for me, because they’ll never go back, as free software has many
benefits. It’s an altruistic gift from thousands of programmers who make us the real owners
of the software our computers run, a wonderful gift that we don’t fully appreciate”, he
concludes.
Josep Prieto, director of the Systems IT programme, points out the high number of students
who took part in the initiative during the pilot test in the last academic year. “Various
initiatives are underway in Spain, but the UOC is among the first to work with 7,000
students”, he says. However, he clarifies that the interest does not lie in competing with
other initiatives, “but in seeing how each individual can help the community to advance and
ensure that the best resources are available to it, which contributes to enhancing everyone’s
knowledge and productivity”. Josep concludes that the DVD which the UOC issues its students
“will also make the workspace accessible to members of each student’s family with whom
they share a computer”.
The university provides support for students to ensure that the workspace based on free
software runs smoothly. Guillem Ferrer from the Communication with Students Area explains that
“a common space has been created in response to the desire to share the knowledge generated
by this project and to boost the sense of community, in keeping with the spirit of cooperative
work”. There, students can find “subject forums for clearing up doubts (help and advice
are provided by a group of experts), a downloads area (a facility for downloading the image file of
the latest version of the DVD sent to students), documentation (students can access the teaching
material for the UOC’s official master’s degree in Free Software) and FAQs (a
substantial amount of compiled information is provided in the form of frequently asked
questions)”, he tells us.
Pedro Mingueza feels that the initiative owes its success to the students’ interest.
“Each and every one of them has chosen a learning system based on technology, meaning that
they inevitably come into contact with it. Many of them will take an interest in a new technology
accessible to them. Furthermore, free software has an increasingly high profile in the media and
our society. Consequently, more and more students are prepared to adopt the values it represents
and enjoy the advantages it entails”, he says. Those advantages notably include financial
factors and the ease with which both the basic software and each subject’s specific software
can be freely and constantly updated via the internet.