The Dangers of Proprietary Systems in Online Teaching

Since March 2020, educational institutions all over the world have been forced to migrate their daily activities to online teaching due to the COVID-19 sanitary emergency. For many schools, this constituted a first important step towards digitalization. However, the transition to remote teaching has brought an unwelcome guest: nonfree software for classes online.

Many schools have adopted video conferencing programs and Learning Management Systems (LMS) that are proprietary software. These nonfree programs are used by software development companies as weapons against students' and teachers' fundamental rights to computer freedom and privacy. Nonfree software is the antithesis of education since it forbids the sharing of knowledge and is specifically designed to prevent it. There should be no place for nonfree software in educational environments.

Freedom-respecting software is readily available for all activities in the digital classroom and should be chosen instead of their proprietary counterparts.