SELF-made site for Education Courseware

Where on the Web do you go for free education and training materials? A project called Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF) has created a site where educators and students can upload and download courseware without charge, or create courseware collaboratively. It maintains free-as-in-freedom content, and is intended for courses on free/libre software.

SELF was launched two years ago as a joint project of several universities and non-governmental entities. According to SELF co-founder G. Nagarjuna of Mumbai, India, existing online education resources are often too general, and structured for general introduction, not for classroom use.

The SELF site has three tiers. Users manipulate a Plone-based Web interface incorporating a text-processing box (tier one) to create and order data through a semantic ordering system (tier two), which stores the semantic metadata in a PostgreSQL database and sends the created courseware to the physical storage (tier three). The site is hosted at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai, where Nagarjuna and his team are employed, while all the SELF data is transferred to a data centre in Amsterdam, where data storage is considerably cheaper than it is in Mumbai, where the site is hosted.

The site is user-editable, without using a special wiki software. Instead, SELF uses the Tiny MoxieCode Content Editor (TinyMCE), a Web-based JavaScript HTML WYSIWYG editor, which is LGPL-licensed.

To use SELF you first have to register and log in. You can then enter text using TinyMCE or upload a locally stored file along with a tag about its copyright status. Once it's on the site, content can be edited by anyone. You can also upload audio and video files, though there are no audio or video editing facilities on the site.

To read more about SELF..