Becta 14/4/05
From Schoolforge-UK
Becta Meeting on 14 Apr 2005 - Preliminary report
This is a preliminary report, pending more complete notes from Becta in a few days' time. Please feel free to insert corrections and additions below. JohnIngleby 17:09, 15 Apr 2005 (BST)
Contents |
Background
The event took place from 10:00am - 3:00pm at the Cable & Wireless plc Training Centre in Westwood Heath, near Coventry. Becta had invited those who attended the Special Meeting at Sun Microsystems' Coventry office, along with representatives of IBM, RedHat, the Open Source Consortium, Open Forum Europe, the Open University, AFFS, UKUUG and some additional Schoolforge-UK members, together with about 6 people from Becta: around 40 in all. (Anyone left out?). Prior to the meeting, Schoolforge-UK submitted a paper to Becta covering issues on the agenda.
Welcome and Introductions
Dr Stephen Lucey, Becta's Executive Director for Educational Technology, opened the meeting, explaining that because of the General Election, Becta must defer publishing any information that might impact future government policies. Consequently the TCO study will not be available until after 5th May. (Update: The report has now been released).
Objectives of the meeting:
- To identify what needs to be done to bring Open Source software into the wider education sector
- To identify what the Open Source community might do to support wider adoption of Open Source software
- To discuss the role of the commercial sector and market forces in relation to Open Source and the range of potential government interventions
- To discuss how the Open Source philosophy might be adopted to support improvements in educational content and learning platforms.
Key areas of Becta's strategy:
- Reducing the technical burden on schools, with reliability and coherence
- Obtaining better value for money by aggegating provision wherever possible, whilst maintaining appropraite local choice
- Focus on learning: information systems should be institutionally focussed with a learner-centric view
- Improving information flow through data collection, aggregation and sharing
- Understanding the scale and complexity of schools' requirements, and maintain innovation and creativity
Becta's vision:
"Provision of appropriate ICT products and services that institutions really value. Deliver coherence leading to increased reliability at affordable costs that institutions recognise as sustainable"
Open Source - the context
Paul Shoesmith, Becta's Assistant Director for Technical Policy, Delivery & Standards, described the System actions that Becta will oversee, and Schools Sector actions that arise from the recently published DfES e-Strategy.
Becta have devised a Conceptual Architecture for schools' ICT infrastructure, with four interlinked components:
- Data Services
- Learning services
- Internal Network
- External Connectivity
The E-Strategy proposes common systems frameworks, open standards and interoperability, such as the existing common basic data set, but with the aim of realtime interoperability. Based on this structure, Becta are preparing a set of Functional Specifications and Technical Documents. These documents will be generic i.e. they will be equally capable of implementation using open source, proprietary or a mix of software. The documents will be available for comment in the near future. They will be underpinned by principles of
- accessibility,
- reliability,
- coherence,
- affordability and sustainability,
- planning, and
- management and support.
TCO - Open Source Software in Schools
Nia Sutton manages Becta's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) project, which has developed an on-line tool for assessing TCO based on data that schools can reasonably be expected to provide.
An opportunistic sample of fifteen schools using FLOSS was selected, and their data compared against a sample of 45 non-FLOSS schools. Due to this methodology it may be difficult to generalize from these results. It was found that:
- FLOSS application differs widely, from server implementations, to desktop use, to Open Source applications running on Windows systems
- FLOSS does provide an appropriate infrastructure for schools
- FLOSS is well supported, with good reliability and performance
- There are issues over compatibility and administration
- Satisfaction with FLOSS varied with users' levels of understanding
Key findings and statistics will be published after 5th May, but include:
- Primary and secondary schools using FLOSS reduced TCO per PC by a substantial percentage.
- Support costs - typically 60% of TCO per PC show the biggest reduction.
- Cost advantages of FLOSS were often used to increase provision, rather than reduce overall budgets
Successful FLOSS implementations showed the following characteristics:
- Technical:
- Lower operating cost of services
- Reliability and ease of use
- Use of Linux operating system
- Dual-platform PCs
- Resistance resulted from users' lack of familiarity
- Administrative roles showed mixed responses, particularly in regard to compatability and training
- Limited range of content-specific FLOSS software
- FLOSS "champions" provide effective leadership and planning
The TCO reports which can be obtained here include:
- Project report: A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs
- Case study report (one particular implementation)
- Information sheet (i.e. statistics)
Conclusions
- FLOSS can be implemented successfully with cost benefits
- Use of office based FLOSS offers a cost-effective alternative to proprietary solutions
Discussion session 1
Group A - Paul Shoesmith - What needs to be done to bring Open Source software into the wider education market?
Please will someone who attended this group insert comments?
Group B - David Hassell - How might the Open Source philosophy be adopted to support wider improvements in educational content and learning platforms?
Key comments in this session included:
- The Open Source philosophy is about sharing, collaboration and contributing back to the wider community.
- Two very different responses: one school had a culture of sharing resources, while another jealously guarded anything that could provide competitive advantage in increasing pupil numbers.
- Important questions for sharing and peer review processes are "who owns it?" and "is it accurate?"
- The essential role of Open Source licences such as Creative Commons was stressed.
- Open Standards for interchange of materials are also essential for widespread development of digital content.
- Opportunities to share content are already in place, such as BECTA's teacher resource exchange, although present use of this is heavily biased towards downloading rather than uploading content.
- There was discussion over whether virtual learning environments such as Moodle can scale to handle greater than school level volumes. Much greater security and reliability are required when paper is replaced by on-line resources.
- Training is needed to carry out peer review effectively. 90% of respondents in a survey wanted materials to be peer reviewed, but 94% were unwilling to do submit material for it!
Discussion session 2
Group A - David Hassell - What might the Open Source community do to support wider adoption of Open Source software?
Please will someone who attended this group insert comments?
Group B - Paul Shoesmith - The role of the commercial sector and market forces in relation to Open Source and the range of potential government interventions?
(Perhaps because it was after lunch I managed to capture few coherent notes on this topic)
- Tenders for many school IT systems are carefully written in generic terms for everything except operating software, where Microsoft is specified. Open source vendors disregard such invitations to tender, even very large ones.
- Open source products have often been developed from within the educational community and teachers and pupils can make contributions to their improvement.
- "Sunlight is still the best disinfectant"
- There should be contact with the recently-announced Open Source Academy being developed by a consortium of Local Authorities.
- Open Source vendors and developers should attend Becta's Expert Technology Seminars - see http://www.becta.org.uk/etseminars.
- The idea was welcomed for a wiki for developing open standards for exchanging data between virtual learning environments - open standards should be developed in an open way.
Plenary session
Paul Shoesmith summed up:
- Notes of the meeting will be available from Becta. While individual responses are welcomed, an aggregate response will be appreciated.
- David Hassell repeated the invitation to comment on Becta's Functional Secifications and Technical Documents
- The QCA (Qualifications and Certification Authority) are preparing a complete e-strategy taxonomy / vocabulary for the National Curriculum down to learning objective level.
- Becta will organise a future meeting to assess progress in bringing Open Source software to schools
- Data Protection restrictions prevent Becta from publishing participants' email addresses. Anyone who wishes to share their email address with other attendees should send it to <conference@schoolforge.org.uk>
Conclusions
A few of us met over coffee before leaving, and concluded:
- The meeting met all our expectations. Becta genuinely want the FLOSS community to contribute to their specifications and documents, to ensure a "level playing field", as well as the perspective we can bring
- While Becta welcome feedback from individuals, they also need a single body to represent the "FLOSS in schools" community: Schoolforge-UK can fulfil that role
- Anticipating increased interest in FLOSS when Becta finally publish their TCO report, we should remodel our web site to place the emphasis on support rather than campaigning.
We are developing these Proposals to broaden FLOSS use in schools, with a view to seeking the participation of other organisations representing the Open Source community.
