I'm hosting a 'hot seat' discussion for school leaders with this title on the National College's website at https://network.nationalcollege.org.uk/collegediscussions/13561 . I'd be delighted if any Open Source Schools folk with National College accounts would come and share their ideas on this. Those without accounts are welcome to contribute to the debate below.

Meantime, here's the 'think piece' that the College requested to set the scene for the discussion.

So what happens to ICT when the money runs out? Given the reduction
in funding across the public sector, the demise of Becta and the Harnessing
Technology grants and no guarantee for ICT’s place in the compulsory core of
the National Curriculum, it’s not difficult to imagine school leaders attaching a
low priority to buying new or replacement computers, to funding new software or
for paying for updates to existing packages. Whilst such a response to budgetary
pressure and a perceived change in policy priorities would be understandable,
there are many who would see it as a shame for our students to lose out on
the opportunities for enhancing, extending, enriching and supporting their
learning across and beyond the curriculum which the effective of use of ICT
offers, or indeed on the chance to develop a deep understanding of how digital
technology works, something on which their engagement in modern society and
job prospects, as well as the national economy, might well depend.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative to spending large amounts of money on
ICT which still lets a school do some really quite exciting things with technology,
and that’s open source software.
With most proprietary software what you pay for is a licence simply to run
the program under certain specific conditions: you typically don’t have permission
to change how it works or to give it away to other people. With open source
software, things are very different: you have access to the program without
restrictions, so you can run it for whatever purpose or in whatever circumstance
you wish, you can give it (or sometimes sell it) to other people and, crucially, you
(or someone who works for you) can modify the program itself, to fix problems
or adapt it to fit in with your way of working. Better still, open source software is
free: i.e. you don’t have to pay developers or distributors for any of this.

There’s a huge variety of open source tools available, covering almost
every aspect of a student’s, teacher’s or school’s requirements and ambitions.
At the simplest level there are open source programs which work on Windows or
Apple computers, covering the same sort of functionality that we’re familiar with
from packaged proprietary software: examples include Firefox as a web browser,
the GIMP for image editing, Audacity for audio editing, Scratch for learning to
program and countless other great, robust bits of software. Running your own
webserver is well inside the technical capabilities of many schools, and the open
source ‘LAMP’ (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack makes it possible to deploy
some great web-based systems yourself: Moodle as a VLE, Drupal or Joomla for
the school website, Elgg for safe social networking, Wordpress for student or
teacher blogs, Koha for your library catalogue, etc. Linux also provides stability
and easy maintenance as a server operating system, with Samba allowing
integration with a Windows network. Moving away from Windows, Ubuntu Linux
is now a mature, user-friendly desktop operating system with thousands of free
software packages available to install directly over the web, in something like a
free ‘App Store’.

In what follows, I want to look first at some of the ways in which a switch
to using open source, or more typically the introduction of open source software
alongside proprietary programs, can save a school money, before going on to
consider some ways in which open source can be one part of moving a school
from a position of technological dependency to one of genuine innovation.

The most obvious way to save money on software is not to pay for it,
and with open source there are no licence fees. Whilst this is great from a
school’s perspective, in that new software and updates aren’t going to be a drain
on school budgets, it’s even better for teachers and students, who can have
copies of the same software on their home computers for free – indeed a school
can burn CDs or make USB sticks of all this software to distribute to students,
teachers and parents, providing ample opportunity for work to be begun in school
and continued at home, or vice versa.

Whilst direct comparisons are hard to come by, Becta’s study of total cost
of ownership back in 2005, and much of the anecdotal evidence from schools that
have started using open source, suggests that there are significant savings in
support costs too. Particularly for server based software – email, web, internet,
files and the like - Linux has always attached a high priority to robust, fault
free running and doing much to make the system administrator’s job as easy
as possible. Linux computers, and the software they run, generally just keep
on going, day-in, day-out with little need for attention. For Ubuntu desktops,
deploying software is easy too: back when I was teaching ICT in a Ubuntu based
suite, I could deploy new software across the network in the 5 minutes before the
start of the lesson, without any need to have technicians build images and the
like which Windows deployment seems to involve. In part thanks to its security
model, there’s no worry about viruses or other malware on Linux either.

Linux as an operating system allows you to make do with old hardware
too. Rather than facing pressure to keep computer hardware up to the latest
spec so you can run the latest version of proprietary operating systems and
applications, Linux has relatively modest hardware requirements, with a typical
desktop from ten years ago being capable of running the latest version of Ubuntu.
Thin client solutions are well supported too, with a room full of old computers
acting as graphical terminals to a server capable of handling 18 or more users
at the same time. Continuing use of a school’s existing hardware isn’t just
about saving money, it also provides a significant reduction in a school’s total
environmental impact too. It’s not surprising that Linux also powers netbooks,
slates and smartphones.One of the often heard arguments against deploying open source is that
the savings in licence costs are outweighed by increases in training, support or
other costs. This is not necessarily the case. It’s fair to say that for technicians,
Linux will be different from Windows, but in many ways it’s actually a much
easier system to maintain, monitor and upgrade thanks to the tool set developed
in old school Unix based systems whose functionality is replicated in Linux. Open
source applications, whether for Windows, OS X or Linux often have vibrant
user and developer communities, and so support queries posted into the user or
developer forums often get answered very quickly, no matter what hour of the
day it is, and the involvement of the software developers in these communities
means that any bugs in the software, or requests for new features, can be sorted
in hours or days rather than months or years. For many users, getting up to
speed on new software, or even a new operating system, is about having chance
to explore and experiment rather than being trained, and the community based
nature of open source makes this easy.

In the end, support, maintenance and training costs, of one form or
another, are going to be there for both open source and proprietary code: with
open source, there aren’t licence fees, upgrade fees, tech support phone charges
or service contract fees to pay, so it really should be working out cheaper. That
said, there are some great local and national businesses who will happily offer
support contracts for open source software, if a school feels it needs to have
something like this in place.

Open source software provides the opportunity for a school to do more, as
well as spend less. Because there’s no licencing to pay for, it’s easy for a school
to add more functionality to its ICT platform. There’s no need to immediately
replace expensive proprietary software, but adding extra applications for students
to use, both on the desktop and the webserver is easy, ranging from desktop
tools for photo, image and audio editing and programming to new web-based
applications for blogging, video editing and safe social networking. Broadening
students’ horizons to more ways in which they can use and learn about ICT for no
cost seems a pretty clear case for making some use of open source.

Beyond the cost savings, the open source development model offers much
to appeal to a school, allowing technically literate staff to adapt the software
deployed to fit more closely to the school’s own vision for learning and teaching,
rather than the other way round. Nowhere is this more evident that with webbased
applications, where the gentle learning curve of PHP, free access to the
scripts and modular architecture of most web-based applications makes it easy
for teachers and technicians to make changes. Providing an opportunity for
technical staff to get involved in software development has clear benefits for
them and their school. There’s nothing to stop students getting involved in
the software development process too: suggesting features, spotting bugs or
contributing documentation. This way, their understanding of software moves on
from that of mere end-user to something of the co-developer.
The community based, often volunteer led, approach that the open
source movement applies to softwarehas wider applications: seeing a school’s
curriculum as something constructed by a community of co-developers rather
than provided off the shelf by a supplier is an appealing idea to many educators,
and this sense of users as co-producers rather than just consumers seems to be
capturing the imagination of many, from Wikipedia and other creative commons
content, to the Slow Food movement and the Big Society itself.

This hotseat is a chance to discuss some of the issues around open
source, and to find out more about what it offers and how it can be used. I’d
also recommend the Open Source Schools community, originally set up by
Becta, but now self supporting at http://opensourceschools.org.uk, for which I’m
community manager. We’re holding a conference for school leaders on ‘Opening
opportunities, freeing learning’ on 5th April in London, please visit http://
openingopportunities.eventbrite.com/ if you’d like to register.