Abstract | The Greek School Network (GSN) is the nationwide network that connects all units of primary and secondary education in Greece. GSN offers a significant set of diverse services to more than 15.000 schools and administrative units, and more than 60.000 teachers, placing GSN second in infrastructure size nationwide. GSN has relied on the emerging power of open source software to build cutting-edge services capable of covering internal administrative and monitoring needs, end user demands, and, foremost, modern pedagogical requirements for tools and services. GSN provides a wide set of advanced services, varying from web mail to virtual classrooms and synchronous/asynchronous tele-education. This paper presents an evaluation of GSN open source services based on the opinions of users who use GSN for educational purposes, and on usage and traffic measurement statistics. The paper reaches the conclusion that open source software provides a sound technological platform that meets the needs for cutting edge educational services deployment, and innovative, competitive software production for educational networks. |