Blog posts

The OER Foundation offers many Free and Open Source Software services to our learners and educators to provide them with resources for learning, developing Open Educational Resources (OER), and collaborating - both professionally and socially - with one another. Due to this proliferation of 'point source' technologies, users have to create a myriad of user accounts, each requesting an email and password and perhaps a user name.

Any reader of this site will notice that we often talk about 'Free and Open Source Software' which we usually abbreviate as FOSS. For those who aren't intimately familiar with the history, trajectory, and nuances (warning - they are big topics) of the Free Software and Open Source Software camps - both subsets of information technology, itself a subset of digital technology - its significance is both arcane and something of a barrier to understanding.

• Tips for this tutorial

• Create a Virtual Private Server

  • VPS Properties:

• Key variables for you VPS

  • Get your Domain lined up

• Editing files

This is another update of my previous posts (installing NextCloud with Collabora Office Online on Ubuntu 16.04 and then NextCloud with OnlyOffice on Ubuntu 18.04). I'm updating it thanks to my colleague in edtech, Stephen Downes' heroic videos showing how he went through this process using my 18.04 instructions on 22.04, running into a few minor issues... this update seeks to remedy the problems he encountered with the older tutorial.

It's been about six months since my last update and, wow, a lot has changed. The OER Foundation (OERF) has embarked on a new initiative inspired by our old friend the Fediverse and the ramifications to on our sustainability thanks to our newer nemesis, Covid19: the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Digital Learning Ecosystem (DLE).

In the past week or two, with Elon Musk completing his purchase and take-over of Twitter, there has been a torrent of defections from the centralised, closed, for-profit platform to its antithesis, the Fediverse - it's a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

In the intervening 17 months since my last update the OER Foundation (OERF) has continued to develop new online services for its global community of learners and educators. All of these services are themselves built with - and hosted on - Free and Open Source Software or FOSS. Each application is the work and responsibility of its own global developer community.

Note: work in progress

Moodle is probably (there's little agreement among the pundits) the market-leading Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Learning Management System (LMS). It's pretty much everywhere. Here's how you can set up and maintain your own Moodle instance(s).

• Prerequisites

Discourse is the world-leading online web-based forum. It's a superb, extremely mature-and-yet-cutting edge platform. It also happens to be Free and Open Source Software, which is why we, at the OER Foundation, use it.

Like all good software, it's undergoing continuous improvement by its developer community who release fairly frequent - perhaps every couple weeks - updates. Luckily, keeping your Discourse forum up-to-date isn't particularly onerous.

With Linux servers, both local and in "the Cloud" (aka a Virtual Private Server or VPS), access is generally remote via a command line interface. This tutorial covers the process of creating normal shell (command line) users who have the ability to perform administrative tasks (via the 'sudo' - Super User DO - mechanism), as well as configuring that user to be able to log in from their workstation via SecureShell (SSH) without needing to enter a password (i.e. using public-private key pairs).