Open Source Schools

Dan Humpherson (@moodledan) writes:

After attending this years MoodleMoot I couldnt help but think that as the Moodle community grows so does the diversity of the user base who attend. The natural progression of a piece of software with global appeal and a global user base.

There were many presentations to choose from and a generous handfull of keynote speeches across the two day event, most of which I found both informative and inspiring.

ULCC’s Frank Steiner has passed on their press release about last week’s Moodle Moot. The next UK Moodle event, which will have a clear focus on practical Moodling in schools, will be TeachMeet Moodle – sign up on the wiki to present or lurk.

MoodleMoot UK 2010 (#mootuk10) hosted by ULCC, welcomed over 250 delegates from across the world to spend two days packed with riveting keynotes and over 60 workshops at University of London’s impressive Senate House, as a delegate from the States remarked on Twitter: “excellent venue, decent coffee, early arrival, waiting to get started. Prof Sugata Mitra starts off with today’s keynote #mootuk10; one of 2000 tweets to be posted during the duration of the conference.

Some thoughts on choosing a VLE from Paul Haigh, originally posted on his blog, and reproduced here with permission.

Whether you are procuring your own learning platform, assessing the one you have or judging one provided for you the following check list will help form your judgement.

Open Source or commercial product

Most products on the market are commercial tools you buy a license for, sometimes called ‘proprietary software’ and these should bring the product quality and service reliability a service contract should bring (alas quality and reliability aren’t always there). Conversely there are a small number of Open Source Learning Platforms. Open Source software essentially means anyone can see and edit the coding behind the product, this renders them commercially impotent as the code can be shared and adapted by anyone. These tools are free to download from the internet. This might make them sound like Heath-Robinson esoteric tools for fanatics, far from it- the most commonly used VLE in the world; Moodle, is just this. 

Open Source software might be free to download, it’s not free to use, you might need technical staff to run the system, you might have to pay for training you will have other technical costs (see below) but its massive uptake can be put down to a few key issues.

Another contribution to the debate, this time from Peter Kemp of TeachFirst and the Open Education Disc.

Moodle has several major universities using it with massive budgets to throw behind the development and customisation of such a thing. Projects such as OpenOffice have Sun and IBM supporting them; universities have adopted/developed other projects such as Kent and Greenfoot. However, when it comes to the ‘minor’ projects such as Audacity, Freemind, infrarecorder, tuxtyping etc, major support is just not there and development can be sporadic or ill focused. Such projects have to rely on volunteers or the occasional philanthropic outpouring such as the Google Summer of Code. It is as if Eric Raymond’s Bazaar (The Cathedral and the Bazaar) has split into the multinational supermarkets which are hugely popular and successful and the niche butchers and bakers which are unresponsive; where you’re not even sure what products they will have on sale next week.

More open source provocation, this time from Paul Haigh, author of Social Network Websites, their benefits and risks.

There’s a certain amount of smugness around the Open Source Schools community; whilst many schools are working hard to get their Virtual Learning Environments off the ground some of the Open Source Schools are, with the flexibility of their systems, able to start planning for a post VLE landscape. Schools with less flexible ICT strategies, perhaps through Managed Services and multi-year contracts, may be locked into a traditional VLE for many years to come based on a system that was probably designed several years ago and already looking obsolete and will a few years from now represent technology of a decade before.

Another Think Tank ‘provocation paper’, from Mark Taylor, CEO of Sirius Corporation.

Open Source software it is widely agreed, is the way of the future.  Not only can Open Source lower your costs, but it produces world class, stable, scalable software with practically no defects, hardly any security vulnerabilities and will open a golden age of empowerment and engagement for all.  Bridging the digital divide and unleashing the potential of individuals everywhere in the world and solving all outstanding problems facing the human race, including world hunger, poverty and global warming.

My ‘provocation paper’ for the recent think tank.

Open source or software freedom isn’t simply another way of procuring software, it’s more a state of mind, a particular attitude to technology. Of course, you can just treat it as a cheap way of getting high quality, robust code, and there’s certainly no requirement to grow a beard, wear sandals or drink real ale in order to install open source applications. However, the philosophies that lie at the core of open source as a movement are important, and, I think have much to offer to education more generally; furthermore, open source approaches to development can apply to things even more important than software, such as curriculum resources, school policies and even the curriculum itself. This brief paper seeks to explore some of these areas.

The following post is a facsimile (with minor edits) of a position paper/provocation paper presented at the Open Source Schools Think Tank held in London on the 26th March 2010.

Just in case you were wondering, all opinions are mine and not those of my employer.

These are not fully realised or worked-through thoughts, but hopefully contain some useful / contentious principles to provoke some discussion, or at least make the reader think. While reading please bear in mind that it may be unfinished!

What’s the problem?

As someone who started working in school-level education systems ten years ago, the one thing which has remained constant throughout has been my amazement at how a certain system has dominated and, in some schools and in many ways, has shaped the way children of all ages are taught and how teachers of all levels of experience work. I am of course referring to the dominant MIS system used in the UK. I have no particular beef with the system , but the fact that it is in some spheres so universally reviled by staff (and hence used ineffectively or in ways which are less than optimal). However, the tortuous process of moving from the MIS system in question to any comparable system are such that most schools appear to feel content (compelled?) to stick with the devil they know. Such a situation can only lead to a lack of innovation. Consider how this landscape would look if the opposite was the case – i.e. that schools could migrate from one MIS system to another with no more than a month of upheaval, which consisted of a certain amount of data transfer (possibly through open XML schemas) and some appropriate retraining of key staff. If this was the case, innovative and (let’s face it) better tools would be rewarded with schools flocking to them – the "the school down the road thinks it’s great so we’re having a look" modus operandi is well developed in terms of technology in schools. Since these tools would operate on data (which would be held in a common, open standard) then it would be possible to use a single tool to access all of the data, or even (for those schools who really wanted to cherry pick the best bits) to use different tools to carry out different tasks – for example, one element of a particular MIS to "do" attendance and another from another provider to "do" assessment. Such an environment would nurture innovation – indeed, innovation would be the main driving force in this sector, which isn’t something that can said to be true now. The market leader is by parts counter-intuitive, lumbering and nowhere near as agile as its competitors. However, it’s still the market leader, which gives you an idea of how difficult it must be to migrate from it.

I work as a network manager at a mid-sized private school in Alton, Hampshire. My job involves dealing with anything IT-related around the whole school (we have a nursery department, prep school, senior school and sixth form, the senior school and sixth form are girls only), from setting up and maintaining workstations to configuring server-based resources such as appropriately filtered Internet access, file storage and web-based applications. I have had previous experience of a similar job in a state school, so here I plan to summarise some of the aspects of the job that relate to the use of open source software within schools, both in the state and private sectors.

The first, most obvious, reason to use open source software is “because it is free”. Especially in a private school, value for money is an important consideration (despite what you might think, private schools aren’t rolling in money – they are businesses that have to justify any expenditure). However, simple capital cost alone is an increasingly minor part of the total cost of ownership of any large, organisation-wide computer system. Any piece of software has to be installed, maintained and kept up-to-date, users have to know how to use it (they might need training, or simply some spare time to figure it out for themselves), and the software might be required to exchange data with other applications or organisations.