Learning opportunities in FLOSS

Learning in higher education is usually bound to institutions as platforms on which teachers prepare and distribute the material that must be learnt in order to distribute and create knowledge. However, a FLOSS-like approach enables learners, in principle, to become more independent from institutional platforms and centralised knowledge distribution. Insights in why and how such forms of self-organised collaborating occur, what benefits they provide as compared to traditional higher educational learning, and what their limitations are, can especially be studied by initiatives that develop within traditional higher educational environments but without the direct involvement of these institutions' representatives (e.g. teachers). In this talk we will consider these aspects by the example of “Students' Knowledge Base”, a self-organised learning platform and community established and operated by a group of computer science students at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME).