Archive:Open University @ Dartmouth

note: this is a work in progress

The research the university produces is open access.

 * original signatory on the OA compact (yay!)
 * http://www.oacompact.org/signatories/

The course materials are open education resources

 * We have a working group for this, with some faculty, staff, and students. We have a mailing list.  We will hopefully assemble a more detailed report on our progress soon.
 * lecture notes, lab assignments, and even practice exams for computer science courses tend to be openly accessible online. However, they are not advertised as open education resources.  furthermore, the course materials are often "sawtoothed"--the materials are made available as the lectures happen and homeworks are assigned, and everything is set back to zero at the beginning of the next term.  However, this is not always the case.  check it out for yourself at course pages of the dartmouth compsci website.

The university embraces free software and open standards.
we're still working on figuring out the status of this. a few observations, most of which are not grounded in solid, empirical evidence
 * lots of public computing terminals have firefox installed.
 * the blitzmail client is (supposedly) open source
 * this dartmouth page doesn't seem to think so
 * but wikipedia does

the school has a computer ownership requirement, and there is a lot of propaganda (i use the term loosely. see also SFC's own Propaganda) distributed to first year students that discusses how difficult it can be to get your computer set up with mandatory computing services (such as the secure network and blitzmail) if you're not using supported hardware and software. furthermore, there is _no_ mention of any Free or open source operating systems in any of this literature. in fact, students have to "register" their computers, stating which operating system they use. there are only two options, and you can guess what they are.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/comp/resources/facilities/store/recommended/ http://www.dartmouth.edu/comp/support/library/start/using-pc/ownership-req/incoming-students/index.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/comp/support/library/start/using-pc/ownership-req/incoming-students/recommend.html http://www.dartmouth.edu/comp/support/library/start/using-pc/ownership-req/incoming-students/class.html

that being said, there are bits of literature scatter across dartmouth's web presence (some in the compsci department, some in the engineering school), that include howto's for making computing services work on linux. in general, it doesn't _seem_ to be anyone in particular's "business" to support students/faculty who are running linux (again, the propaganda states exactly what the school does support, and GNU/Linux is not on the list). however, there are a handful of people, mostly sysadmins, who are interested in helping. It's also worth noting that there is a local LUG, although membership seems to largely (mostly ?) be locals who aren't affiliated with the school.

If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.
???

The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.
Dartmouth has what appears to be an official statement on illegal filesharing online.