Open Source software brings a lot of advantages not just for businesses, for academic people too - students, faculty and staff.

Due to its very nature, students can access the source code, understand and learn from it. In turn they start contributing to it. As most education about Computers should be practical oriented, students learn themselves by looking at code than reading books. This gives them a direct overview of the industry standard software. Faculty usually points them to the right place to look for resources. User groups, IRC and every other possible places to meet other programmers can be utilized by these students.

Non-programmers also can reap the benefits of Open Source. Computer Science and allied branches have to learn various kinds of softwares as part of their syllabus. Usually colleges have the freedom of choosing the software they want to learn. Open Source definitely makes a big impact in this area. Universities usually prefer Open Source for learning because of their less cost, good following of international standard and ease of customization.

There are also a lot of tools for academia based on Open Source. Like the Sakai Project(http://www.sakaiproject.org/) for maintaining course work, which is co-developed by 3 major universities, there are also software to help in day-to-day workings of academics.

Some more below:
Aggregators (Aggie, Awasu,Plum),
Classroom tools (Chalksite, Engrade, Slideshare, Schoopy),
Collaboration tools (BackPack, BaseCamp, LiveText),
Course management tools (ATutor, EduTools, Sakai and even Drupal)

Thanks to Namita for giving me the above list.
As part of Twincling's commitment to academia, in improving the standards of our technical education, we are conducting a session on "Long distance teaching with Open Source Web2.0 tools" at Vellore Institute of Technology.
We are confident it will benefit the students and faculty of VIT.