UberStudent is upping the ante with its plans to offer free online courses, using the Moodle learning environment, to teach students to academically excel with its platform. UberStudent dubs itself 'a free Linux learning platform for learning, doing, and teaching academic computing at the higher education and advanced secondary levels'.

“I began UberStudent as a way to place sets of smart and dedicated computing tools, and just the right amount of support, into the hands of college and college-bound secondary students,” said Stephen Ewen, UberStudent's founder and lead developer. “At core, it's an academic success curriculum in the form of an installable, ready-to-go learning platform. With UberStudent, students can learn to really excel at the skills and habits they must have to succeed in college,” he added.

UberStudent has taken a decidedly different approach from other Linux distributions designed for education, which Ewen hopes will make his platform too hard to resist for students and learning institutions.

UberStudent's reach for institutional academic ties is evident in two of the applications it includes among its clearly well-thought-out sets of programs, organized around its core skills approach. The bibliographic manager Zotero was developed by George Mason University, and the concept and content mapping application VUE by Tufts University. Students will be glad to find that UberStudent is also well-decked for multimedia, graphics and games.

UberStudent is built upon Debian, Ubuntu, and “dozens of other distros who have worked to make Linux desktop-friendly,” according to Ewen. “I developed it in the same spirit in which scholars build upon and refine the work of others to advance knowledge,” he stated. “Hopefully, everyone will benefit,” he added.

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