Advantages of Open Source Based e-learning Tools in the Collaboration and Training in the Agricultural Education

摘要

Abstract. One of the primary benefits of open source software is that it reduces the costs to produceudsystems and services. Traditional proprietary software vendors are realizing this fact, and are beginning toudbuild their closed software products quietly using lots of open source software. In the long-run, competitionudwill force these cost savings to be passed to the consumer. In this paper the most important free andudcommercial e-Learning systems and their functional features, modules, standards, hardware and softwareudrequirements by Vendor’s Web sites and different e-Learning service portals are shortly summarized andudcompared. We selected the Moodle system within an European projects, which is a software package forudproducing Internet-based courses and web sites. It is an ongoing development project designed to support audsocial constructionist framework of education. The aim of our European project was to promote the use ofudmultimedia knowledge in adult training / lifelong learning in order to facilitate competitiveness,udemployability and mobility of adults who are victims of the digital divide or of some of its components suchudas distance, initial level of knowledge, language, use of complex technologies. One of the results of theudNODES project is that we introduced the Moodle system into the graduate, postgraduate PhD, adultudtrainings programmes and it is a very successful system as an educational portal system for our faculty. Weudare using some extended tools in Moodle such as the Word templates for easy making Moodleudquestionnaires, Covcell Audio/Video Conferencing Tool, Inwicast Mediacenter, Audio recorder, AutoViewudPresenter which allows you to put video on-line with synchronised slides.