Abstract:

The current development of the Information and Knowledge Society poses various challenges to educational organizations, among which the incorporation of a new learning technology is especially relevant for at least the last twenty years: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), for which the public educational systems have developed relevant policies that have required the implementation of economic, technical and management resources, often with uncertain results.

The national experience in Spain has been largely dominated by the educational implementation of technical solutions based on the use of commercial proprietary software products, under the model of use license agreements, in which educational organizations are placed in a client role, who acquires and uses mass distribution software products, developed based on market criteria by external companies, which control the intellectual property of the software and, therefore, all aspects of its development and functionality. However, in the last decade the development in some Spanish autonomous communities of contextualized computing solutions for education based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This model guarantees users and developers in the educational administration the freedom to use, copy, modify and redistribute computer programs, through open licenses, in a manner consistent with the current trend of Open Educational Resources.

The research is based on the study of four FOSS projects, developed by official public education agencies in the autonomous communities of Catalonia, Madrid, Andalusia and the Valencian Community, formulated under the autonomy criterion offered by the decentralized State model of distribution of educational competences that exists in the country.

These experiences have common characteristics, such as a trajectory of more than ten years, the investment in own equipment, the hiring of personnel for management tasks and local technicians for development and support, among other elements that allow the implementation of a public technological infrastructure at the service of objectives of each autonomic educational project. As a base tool, each of these projects develops its version of the GNU Linux operating system, on which a wide set of FOSS is incorporated, based on open standards, specially developed or modified to adapt to the specific needs of the educational community to which it is addressed.

The research seeks to reveal the elements that have supported the development of these official projects, in addition to identifying the main characteristics of these experiences, to help understand the determining factors of the use of this technology for the organizational and pedagogical management at the primary and secondary education levels.

The analysis is based on a comprehensive criterion of the phenomenon, located in the interpretive paradigm, seeking to understand the phenomenon from the informants' perspective, using a mixed methodology with a qualitative approach.

The extensive article offers the preliminary results of the study, which allow identifying and organizing the arguments for the educational implementation of FOSS based on technical, ethical, economic, strategic and pedagogical criteria.

Keywords:

ICT, public education, Free and Open Source Software, Open Educational Resources.