Introduction

If you work in education you will know only too well what an LP is (and for our older readers, it's not made of vinyl). Otherwise you probably have no idea, ditto the near synonyms VLE and CMS.

They respectively stand for: Learning Platform,Virtual Learning Environment, and Course Management Software.

For our purposes I will use the collective acronym, LP.

But, before plunging into the debate it must be said that schools themselves know the abbreviations better than they do the products and, be aware, there is no single agreed 'take' on what exactly a LP is.

What you really need to know, though, is that UK publicly-funded schools were mandated to have acquired a LP by the end of 2007.

Those suppliers reading this post who have had experience of publicly-funded  'you must have' procurements will smile nostalgically at memories of the  feeding frenzy that follows. But in this case, as we near the end of 2008, not all schools possess or have access to a LP. So what is going on?

The LP

Essentially a LP is a suite of software that structurally consist of database-driven web-pages hosted on local or remote web servers which are then made available to users via an Intranet or the Internet. The LP's database connects via various plug-ins to other databases used by schools such as their Management Information Software (MIS) and users usually authenticate against Microsoft's Active Directory.

LPs exist to provide content organised in a course-orientated way and, as such, are often called CMS (course management software) packages. Typically a 'course' has a tutor (who may or may not have editing rights), students enroll electronically and are given access to its resources. These consist of information repositories (text, graphics, multimedia etc) and interactive resources (wikis, forums, chat, mail, quizzes). The students can upload assignments to their course folders.

That's it for the nuts and bolts. Hopefully now for something more interesting.

LPs not all created equally: the perfect lock-in

The technically adept will realise that a LP is not based on rocket science. It is very easy to create a graphical user interface with a few scripts attached to a database. Too easy unfortunately. Every vendor and his dog duly created their own LP and set about marketing it aggressively into a virgin market.

One feature of a LP that made it particularly attractive to proprietary vendors is that its database and associated scripts are hidden from sight. Combine this with with the thousands of man/woman hours required to load up a significant body of information onto the LP and you have the perfect lock-in.

Open Source LPs are not so evil

Standing out from the crowd is Moodle.

Moodle is the leading educational LP in Europe and is the choice of the Open University who have invested millions in customising its code to suit its needs.

Moodle stands out for two reasons: it's free and it is 100% open source software. Surely then a 'no-brainer' for UK schools. You would have thought so but you should not be surprised to hear that despite having five official Moodle partners in the UK not one is Becta-approved.

The result is that Moodle's penetration into the schools market is low and actually reducing as a result of the happy Moodle users not having a UK government accredited product!

Times may be changing though, one Open Source company has been very recently been admitted to the elite 12 accredited suppliers of software to schools. However, and here's the ridiculous bit, some existing Moodle partners feel that the presence of a Becta-accredited company in their ranks will adversely affect their businesses. What they fail to understand, however, is that not having a Becta-approved supplier as a partner has seen schools abandon Moodle pilots in favour of more expensive proprietary, Becta-sanctioned alternatives.

Moodle's codebase may be open source, but the project's tendency towards commercial protectionism is contrary to the spirit of the GPL and will, ultimately, be self-defeating in the UK.

Are LPs worth bothering with?

Well actually they are, and they have a lot of potential. LPs offer the possibility of moving the learning of students into a new context, away from the schoolroom and the timetable. Being web-based, location and time become unimportant (ie classic Open University Stuff without the late night TV and tank tops) and a raft of teaching-learning theories have been articulated to describe just how the LP enables independent and collaborative learning through grandly titled 'constructivist pedagogical processes'.

All very fine I'm sure but there are a few snags.

Snag 1: Students of secondary school age (by and large) do not pursue independent learning programs, just as (by and large) people do not enroll with the Open University. Obviously the OU is a real and valued asset for those who do enroll, ditto then so are LPs for those who can make use of them.

School children are increasingly spoon-fed in the pursuit of exam grades and the consequence of this is that universities and employers beg schools to increase their pupils' ability to think and study independently. A paradox is thus created whereby independent learning facilities are installed alongside a population increasingly ill-equipped to take advantage of it.

Snag 2: Teachers need to expend literally thousands of person-hours to populate a LP with content. Where they do a valuable asset is created but it should come as no surprise that as low as 30% of those schools with LP's have found the time to do so. Indeed, in many schools the VLE/LP is a feared beast. Oversold by Senior Staff to their teachers as the important development in our time and ordered to make use of it on pain of being moaned at, the onerous LP is often not a safe topic to broach in a staffroom.

So what is the solution? How can this technology be leveraged? The answer may lay in the plains of Spain and the rain of North West England.

Content, content. content...and Moodle again

LPs need content more than anything else. They need e-text books, videos, schemes of work and accompanying resources to make use of all the fancy front-end features like wikis, forums, quizzes and pupil tracking stuff work.

In Spain, as many now know, information technology in education is Open Source, more or less exclusively. If this is an indicator of a relatively new democracy confidently embracing new technologies then it is not surprising to hear that they already have a web-based, open source powered content repository for educational materials called AGREGA. This repository contains the collective content from hundreds of schools and external publishers.

The North West Learning Grid (NWLG) is working with a UK-based Open Source company to bring such a repository to the UK, with a clever twist.

Think about this: there are lots of empty LP's with cool features and grumpy resource - starved teachers. NWLG is creating a information repository that any school can 'front-end' it using their LP. Job done. All schools will have access to moderated high quality content to which they can contribute or merely subscribe.

Snag 3: I knew there would be a snag, LP's are mostly proprietary, how the heck do their API's work?

The answer is simple. Use the Moodle to start from (because their code is Open Source) and create the plugin to the repository, then release it under the GPL. Then owners of the proprietary LPs can use the plugin for free to allow their products to access the repository too.

This is a canny solution. Not only would it be good business strategy for the repository (the more users the more revenue) but it's very good for all schools as the solution is independent of the VLE they have been locked into.

Summary

LPs are becoming more important to colleges and universities as they put their content on-line and organise it for their students, however in schools more often than not they have failed to gain traction.

LPs will take off in schools when they become powerful content-delivery platforms.

They all use standard web technologies which means  they can be accessed by any web-enabled device and because the latter are becoming ubiquitous (be they phones, mini-books or e-books) that means in turn everyone can be given access to educational content which has been vetted, organised and even grouped into courses.

If it happens it'll be thanks to the Open Source way of doing things.

Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your role at the North West Learning Grid?

I’m Chief Executive of the North West Learning Grid , previously I worked for 8 years with Knowsley Local Authority. Knowsley is widely recognized as having a very progressive ICT strategy and is one of the first Authorities to implement a Building Schools for the Future Program.

How does the NWLG work with schools in your region?

NWLG is funded by each of the 18 Local Authorities and delivers services that are commonly required by all. This is difficult as North West Authorities are as big as Cheshire, as small as Blackpool, they include Manchester and Liverpool and each LA has very different needs and development states. We don’t work directly with schools, we provide services to Local Authorities who then work with their schools to exploit the benefits of regional aggregation.

Who do you partner with to deliver services to schools? How do you complement each other?

We provide 1GB of Internet transit to North West schools, through JANET and funded by BECTA . So JANET and BECTA are important partners. Our Interconnect between Local Authorities is provided by THUS. All of our other partnerships are within the Education Community. The way you work with any delivery partner requires both parties to be very open and transparent about what each needs and expects and for each to be highly committed to improving the education of our young people.

Why do you think Open Source Software is so important to the future of ICT in schools?

ICT in education is very fast moving and the UK Government has had a recent history of subsidising the commercial market by funding schools to do things such as buying digital resources and implementing learning platforms. Many of the products and solutions picked have very different proprietary standards. The Open Source Community is driven by, and can only flourish, by common open standards and this model suits the needs of schools and indeed the needs of any sensible ICT strategy, far more than the patchwork quilt of commercial solutions currently across UK education. Schools are not individual institutions, they form one cohesive body of educators and it is essential that they are able to use local variations of products that have the same standards at their core.

Why is Open Content so important in education?

Whilst I accept the position of commercial content developers and the innovation some of them have brought into learning resources in schools I am also aware that some £465M of public funding was used for schools to purchase resources out of eLearning Credits. Now that funding has finished schools are left with a list of subscription licences and no content assets to keep and use within their shiny new Learning Platforms. The nature of education and the way in which collaborative learning takes place, requires permanency and mobility of learning assets. We have exactly the opposite from the eLearning Credit Strategy and quite the opposite from how most of the commercial providers operate. They seem to understand the weaknesses of government grants far more than the customer base they hope to retain. Open Content is very important but we have self imposed barriers as well as having a schools community that understands very little about IPR and has very few tools that make content creation and sharing particularly easy.

What commercial and technical benefits do you think UK schools can gain from using more Open Source Software and Open Content?

I think that Open Source will enable schools to break a commercial monopoly that isn’t doing anybody any favours, and that includes the commercial companies themselves. Easy ways to share content creates easy ways to make it available to schools and therefore reduce sales costs. Common Open Source code in Learning Platforms reduces a company’s risks in development and enables them to innovate around that standard core. Reduced costs across the education system means more money can be invested in exploiting the technology, leading to continued demand.

What do you see as the remaining obstacles for their adoption?

Leadership. Why do we spend millions on MS Office in our schools when a bit of government expenditure helping schools to understand how Open Office can be installed and used would save all this money? Why didn’t we have an Open Source Core Learning Platform funded and developed four years ago rather than encourage 30 or more commercial products to compete against each other with 30 or more separate developments taking place, putting 30 or more barriers between schools in sharing any learning resources they create?

BECTA should have, and still could, form an Open Source Unit that concentrates purely on identifying and establishing Open Source Communities specifically for use within our education institutions. I’m aware of their sparring with Microsoft and the School’s Open Source Project but these are token gestures. We have much to learn from other countries who are both smarter and a lot more resilient when it comes to implementing Open Source within Education. How about Macedonia where they note that: “with the use of free and open source software, our education system can provide computer-based education for all school children within the limited financial and infrastructural confines that most institutions face today." Now there’s a good idea that ‘we’ didn’t think of. Let’s consider schools to be a single business community with a common set of goals and a huge ICT budget, and look for the most economical way to deliver their needs and get Value For Money.

Too much money available makes funding policy lazy and wasteful. Maybe now leaner times are here, Open Source will be seen as the ONLY way forward if we are to maintain ICT levels in schools?

Which Open Source projects excite you the most at the moment? What can you tell us about them?

North West Learning Grid has been trying to tackle the issue of how schools who have different Learning Platforms can share digital learning resources. If a Local Authority has £50,000 of education materials created by its City Learning Centres or its Specialist schools then that becomes £7.5M of resources across our 150 Local Authorities but each can only see and access just the resources they themselves have funded. What they lack is an easy way to collect these resources, apply a common set of standards across them and then deliver 150 times as much. We’ve found a great Open Source Repository product in Spain called AGREGA and over the next few months will be working with Sirius Corporation to implement a system where every Local Authority can easily share these resources. So for less than £100K we’ll release several million pounds worth of public assets and make every future digital resource investment worth 150 times more than it would have been!

How do you see the VLE market in UK schools maturing?

I see just a few major companies winning Building Schools for the Future (BSF) contracts and dominating the market and the innovators being squeezed out by the risk of having to innovate and a lack of major contracts. I would hope that Open Source competes against this through more developments around Moodle but it would take a brave BSF Local Education Partnership to go down the Open Source route when the project is heavily weighted towards having a single commercial supplier solution.

How do you see the role of regional grids for learning evolving over the next five years?

Regional Learning Grids will always have a role to play in aggregating expenditure from schools and Local Authorities but the agenda has moved on from broadband to sharing expertise and providing things that, by doing them regionally or cross regionally, they are done once rather than 20 or 30 times. Maybe, in the absence of effective national leadership on ICT development, the Regional Bodies will use Open Source Projects to deliver solutions that will redefine where that leadership comes from?