This article reflects the experiences and findings of the project team in the early part of the project. We make no claim that it is a representative sample. We hope you will add to the range and substance, through comments, postings in the Forum and perhaps by submitting a Case study, and the article will be updated in due course to incorporate extra material.
OSS desktops
We visited a primary school that uses a mix of Windows and Linux (Edubuntu) thin clients. They had decided to go for this approach to maximise the number of PCs in the school, the move being initiated by the school head. The school reported that the Linux machines are very popular with Reception children and teachers because the majority of use there is with web content (EducationCity, Espresso) or general PC familiarity. Interestingly, the small physical size of the thin clients, coupled with some mini-keyboards and mice, means the school can get more PCs into a space in the Reception classroom. For older primary children, the suite of applications that comes with Edubuntu seems to serve pretty well alongside the Microsoft machines. The children are able to switch between the two platforms without any problems at all, and with almost no learning curve.
We also found several examples of Linux PCs being used in “internet café” and general use situations where the requirement for a basic PC with a browser and word processor meant that older machines (too slow and with too little memory to run new versions of Windows) could be reused successfully.
OSS Applications
We’ve spoken to a number of schools who use OSS applications as part of their Windows desktop provision. It seems GIMP and Audacity are very popular, probably because (a) these are great applications and (b) their proprietary counterparts are pretty expensive. We also hear about OpenOffice being used as an alternative to MS Office. An added bonus is that it apparently reads corrupted MS Office documents quite well even where MS Office says they are unrecoverable.
Where the web, and particular Web2.0 applications (blogging, wikis, podcasting), are involved, open source applications predominate.
Open Source and Inclusion
We’ve heard quite a few reports that inexpensive mini laptops (such as the ASUS eeePC) are being given to children as personal devices which they can take home. Unit cost for the software as well as the hardware is a big issue here, and it is clear that the lower specification machines run Linux (eg http://www.puppylinux.org/">Puppy Linux) and the packaged OSS applications more happily than Windows, as well as this being cheaper. The people we spoke to suggested that providing an internet browser and an office suite covers over 90% of computing needs for the children (including primary children). Where more specialist applications were required and could not be downloaded, these were supported at the school.
We intend to cover more on this approach to using OSS, and ask anyone who has interesting experiences to pass them on through contributions in the Forum.
The use of the Moodle VLE has been quietly growing in schools. In 2006, OSS-watch identified that 56% of FE colleges were using Moodle. The number is certainly higher now, and Moodle is also used extensively in HE. Initially regarded as perhaps too “technical” for schools, we have found many schools are now adopting it successfully, and finding ways to make Moodle work for them, where previous (expensive) VLEs have often fallen by the wayside and been unused. It is hard to tell whether this is due to Moodle’s functionality and customisability or is representative of a maturing use of ICT. We do think that being able to start working with it ‘for free’ reduces the pressure on getting the approach right first time for the entire school, and perhaps better supports organic growth. From an OSS perspective, it appears that Moodle has succeeded in creating a sustainable community of developers and users, working across all the main education sectors (something no proprietary suppliers have achieved to date). Where VLEs are used well, they quickly become a business-critical resource – it cannot be the case that Moodle’s success is down entirely to the fact it is free.
With your help, we plan to look more closely at how schools are using Moodle, and to bring into the discussion relevant experiences from other educational sectors.
File and webservers
A number of the schools we spoke to use OSS servers for filing and webservices. Quite often, these appear to be managed alongside Windows Servers, on a mix and match basis, without any real problems.
OSS as part of an emerging ICT strategy
This story reflects the experience of a governor of a large secondary school with around 1600 students aged 11-18, and about 1000 PCs. It uses OSS applications to manage its network, and has a successful and growing Moodle service. The desktop PCs use MS Windows and Office as the core tools. The staff are well aware of the potential for OSS, and the strategy is discussed with both the ICT lead technician and the SMT members responsible for ICT.
Five years ago the ICT in the school was flakey – the network and core services (e-mail, web, administration and enterprise applications) were based on high quality software, but the uptime and level of service were poor. Teachers’ confidence in the network and their own ICT skills was fragile, and the focus was skewed too much to bringing in this shiny new thing - shiny and new in both educational and technical senses. The school business manager (new to the school) described it: “we have a dodgy Ferrari of an ICT system – sometimes brilliant but often broken”. He set about replacing it with “a Mondeo estate” – nothing fancy but always starts in the morning.
This has been achieved. Unsurprisingly, teacher confidence has blossomed and the school is now making good use of ICT both for administration and across the curriculum. Teachers now trust that the service will work, and so the inevitable support outages and upgrades are all conducted in a less febrile atmosphere. In the rather uncharacteristic words of the ICT technician, “the delicate flower of user acceptance has bloomed”.
The annual cost of core software licences for the school is less than the cost of a teacher (illustrating the heavy discounts over commercial rates that education enjoys). The recent upgrade to Office 2007 was painful – the “delicate flower” was at risk for a while. The appetite therefore, for a wholesale change to an OSS desktop and office suite does not exist. However, the need to offer a varied ICT curriculum (and hence offer a range of different applications), the desire to reuse rather than discard older PCs, and the targeted use of OSS in some curriculum areas (where it is conspicuously better value than the proprietary alternatives) means the school is continuing to experiment in areas where the risk is controllable.
The school is confident that this is a sensible approach at this time. Building work has started on the BSF programme, and from 2010 the school will be moving wholesale to a managed service of thin clients, OpenOffice and centralised VLE services. Other schools in the district open in September this year. It will be interesting to see how the change management is handled
General impressions
There is definitely a lack of clarity in many of the schools we spoke to about how and where OSS could become a part of their ICT strategy. There are also residual concerns about the stability and supportability of OSS, as well as the quality of the user experience.
As the project develops, we would like to hear from schools that are making successful use of OSS (or, indeed, if you’ve tried and failed, or even thought about it and rejected going down that road). We have a friendly team who are looking for good examples to cover – we’ll do the work of writing up the studies, so if you’ve got a story to tell, please do get in touch - moderator [at] opensourceschools [dot] org [dot] uk.
Alternatively, please post any comments you have on this page using the comment option below or go to the Forum and post your contributions there (you will need to be registered and logged in to the site).
