About this site

This site exists to help others collaborate with, and in some case learn from, us at the OER Foundation, where we build and maintain the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) internet services that make the OERu's OER-based courses available to a global audience, and our community interaction, and educator collaboration possible.

We feel that only with FOSS can scalable online educational opportunities truly become equitable and universal. The OER Foundation has a policy of only using FOSS where ever possible - turns out, that's everywhere.

We do that to ensure that no user ever has to buy a license for a specific supplier's closed software - or sacrifice their privacy and personal data to a surveillance business model - to participate in any of our courses. It's in our terms of reference.

We won't even install or use proprietary (the opposite of FOSS) ourselves, on any of our computers, given any choice. Instead, please don't be offended if we offer to show you how to gain a bit of freedom, control, and agency in your computing experience, while also almost certainly cutting your costs.

The primary author of this site and its how-to posts is Dave Lane, the OER Foundation's Open Source Technologist, but he's had the benefit of being able to build on a lot of clever hacks by his esteemed predecessor in the role, Jim Tittsler. If you look at our open software repository you'll see his name along side much of our most innovative work.

For the record, this website is built on Drupal - currently version 9 - (In years past, Dave ran a commercial web development business that specialised in Drupal implementations) and is deployed with Docker containers using Docker Compose, just like most of our publicly accessible services.