Unfortunately, educational institutions haven't been very good about making the most of Open Source opportunities. It is mostly because they don't understand how Open Source works and have been locked in to legacy systems by the likes of Microsoft and Blackboard. Education and Open Source should go hand in hand but so far they haven't. But now it looks like the tide is slowly turning, at least on the part of e-learning.

Gartner: E-learning Market Pushing Toward Open Source
Campus Technology: In the survey, Gartner found "clear movement in the market" toward more open-source platforms in 2007--26 percent of platforms on surveyed campuses were on open source e-learning system such as Moodle or Sakai, and Gartner projects that number will grow to 35 percent by the end of 2008.

This is a nice complement to a recent story on Open Source being the increasing preference of developers in the UK:

PC World - Business Center: UK Developers Prefer Open Source The majority of U.K. developers who do not already use open source licenses for their products would do so if they had the choice, according to a new survey from Kingpin Intelligence.