Drupal, Wordpress, Moodle, BigBlueButton, Gibbon, and more.
No-cost software and global communities to extend and support education.
Educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials, data, and educational
opportunities available without barriers imposed by restrictive licensing or exclusive proprietary technologies. Open source software benefits schools in several
ways: increasing access and equity, liberating teachers and schools, and saving money. LOCUS PLEXUS provides educational institutions with a portfolio of software
solutions that enables education and access and expands opportunities through technology and community.
The LOCUS PLEXUS core solution for education includes, Drupal or Wordpress (Web Content Management), Moodle (Learning Management), BigBlueButton (Web Conferencing), and several other enterprise applications that can extend administrative capacity for Constituent Relationship Management (CiviCRM), Student Information System (Gibbon), Library Management (Evergreen, VuFind), and even desktop software for office productivity (LibreOffice), graphics (Blender, GIMP, Inkscape & Scribus, and even whole operating systems (Ubuntu) for laptop and desktop PC's and network servers.
Schools have practical reasons to use open source software, and arguably a societal duty to do so.
— School Education Gateway, European Union
Drupal
Drupal is an open source CMS for creating digital experiences that empower students, support faculty and administration, and engage parents and alumni. Build department-specific websites, online applications, community portals, and more. Protect institutional data with a platform built on security best-practices.
Reviews: G2, The Blueprint, Gartner
WordPress
WordPress is open source software you can use to create a beautiful website, blog, or app. Beautiful designs, powerful features, and the freedom to build anything you want. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.
Reviews: G2, PC Magazine, TechRadar
BigBlueButton
BigBlueButton is a free and open source web conferencing system with features including audio/video sharing, presentations with extended whiteboard capabilities (pointer, annotations, and zooming), public and private chat, breakout rooms, screen sharing, integrated VoIP, and support for PDF and office documents.
Reviews: G2, Software Advice, TechRadar
CiviCRM
CiviCRM is an open source web-based system for constituency relationship and association management. CiviCRM allows non-profits, NGOs, and
advocacy groups to manage donors, members, event registrants, grant-applications, volunteers, voters, general business contacts, employees,
clients vendors.
Reviews: G2, Fit Small Business
Gibbon
Gibbon is built by teachers to solve problems common to all schools, allowing seamless planning, teaching, and assessment. Gibbon is free, open source software: its flexible design gives schools complete control and freedom. Teachers, students, parents, and administrators all access Gibbon from a simple web-based platform.
Reviews: Capterra, OpenSource.com
Evergreen
Evergreen is a free and open source integrated library system used by more than 2,000 libraries worldwide. Evergreen is used by
libraries to provide their public catalog interface as well as to manage back-of-house operations such as circulation (checkouts and checkins),
acquisition of library materials, and sharing across libraries.
Reviews: G2, American Libraries
Blender, GIMP, Inkscape, OpenShot, & Scribus
Fully open source and free graphics tools to replace Adobe's proprietary products: animation & video (Blender), photo editing (GIMP),
vector graphics (Inkscape), video editing (OpenShot), and desktop publishing (Scribus) provide.
Reviews: Opensource.com, eCommerce Solutions, OpenCourse
LibreOffice
Schools, colleges, and universities around the world use LibreOffice every day. The free and open source office suite is available as a desktop app or through cloud services. Compatible with Microsoft Office, LibreOffice includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, and a formula editor.
Ubuntu OS
Ubuntu powers PCs, laptops, and servers across educational and non-profit environments. Ubuntu is built by students, teachers, parents, and programmers who believe learning and knowledge should be available to everyone. Ubuntu ships with open source educational software and is easy to install and maintain.
Drupal Content Management System
Drupal, the favorite content management system of universities, is a flexable, scalable, and secure open source content management
system (CMS) for creating emersive digital experiences. Drupal's modular, highly scalable, extendable, and secure architecture makes it ideal for educational consortia, school districts,
colleges, and universities, where multiple contributors across departments want the flexibiltiy and independance to manage independant sites.Below are just a few examples of educational
websites powered by Drupal, but many more exist and we invite you to
explore how your peers have succeeded with Drupal.
Wordpress Content Management System
WordPress is the world's most popular content management system powering 34% of all websites on the internet.
This simple, yet dynamic, software provides a rich tool-set, powerful features, and with thousands of modules to expand functionality, is tailored for public, private, and charter schools.
A popular choice among K12 school districts, WordPress is simple, safe, and secure. Below are just a few examples of educational websites powered by Wordpress,
but many more exist and we invite you to
exlore how your peers have succeeded with Drupal.
Moodle Learning Management System
Moodle, the world's most popular learning management system, is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments.
Below are just a few examples of educational websites powered by Moodle,
but many more exist and we invite you to explore
how your peers have succeeded with Moodle.
BigBlueButton Web Conferencing
A professional web conferencing system designed specifically for online teaching and learning. BigBlueButton's feature rich
toolset includes real-time sharing of audio, video, slides, chat, and teacher
and/or student screens. Teachers can engage students with built-in polling, breakout rooms, multi-user whiteboards, with every tool included in any recorded sessions, allowing faculty and schools to make
any lesson available online for later review.
More Open Source Education Software
Identifing the right software to meet your institution's academic and administrative needs requires more than simply reviewing features and functionality. Schools should also consider technical requirements
and alignment, the maturity and sustainability of the software and development communities, support and service options, and training and documentation resources. In addition to the core applications
included above, LOCUS PLEXUS has identified several other open source options that can help K12 and higher education extend their academic programs and administrative resources through open source software
and computing.
