THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: School Education in Kerala has completed full migration to Free and Open Source Software with state curriculum committee according permission to implement FOSS in Higher Secondary section also, an official today said.
"With the decision of State Curriculum committee headed by State Education Minister C Raveendranath to implement Free and Open Source Software in Higher Secondary section also, it is 'Time Out' for proprietary software in School Education in Kerala, following the footsteps of Primary-High School sections," Anvar Sadath K, Executive Director of IT@School Project, said.
Migration to FOSS also enabled the government to save an amount of Rs.300 crore, he said. "It is not the cost saving that matters more, but the fact that the Free Software license enables not only teachers and students but also general public an opportunity to copy, distribute and share the contents and use it as they wish," he said.
"IT@School would not be able to come up with such extensive ICT education programme if the proprietary software was in place and we are ready to support other countries and states in extending these programmes," he said. "Now we will add Accounting packages also into this package so that it can be used for both teaching learning and office accounting," he said in a release here.
Information technology has been a part of the High school curriculum in Kerala since 2003 with IT being made a compulsory subject for standard eight, he pointed out. Even though the FOSS based education started by 2005, it was made mandatory by 2007 with the state government making it official with a government order, he said. Thus Kerala has become the first State with the largest deployment of FOSS in the education sector, as part of the ICT enabled education being implemented by IT@School in High School section in the state, he claimed.