The Online Education Database is running a story on the way the Open Source movement changed education, that assumes a causal relationship between the two:

MIT provides just one of the 10 open source educational success stories detailed below. Open source and open access resources have changed how colleges, organizations, instructors, and prospective students use software, operating systems and online documents for educational purposes. And, in most cases, each success story also has served as a springboard to create more open source projects.

This reminds me of something I have often wondered: Was the open source movement the catalyst for opening up education? Or was it simply the advent of instant communication and easy to copy digital media? Haven’t the ideals of open source long existed in academia?