General help

The TES have given me a blog and this subject is the very first post up on that. I suspect quite a few commercial providers will want to co-opt Moodle to get at the table.

I would recommend that HUGTOB should be reconfigured to:

a) Alert schools and, in particular, senior management about the benefits of buying hosting and CPD as opposed to just a VLE with ongoing licence committments and charging for CPD on top of that.

b) Strategies to counter LA buy in or if it is a fait accomplis (as in the case where certain RBC have long standing commercial "agreements" with VLE providers) - ask questions about CPD where their money has been aggregated to make a spend on commercial providers and what value added over and above a commercial system will make to overall sustainability. If I were holding the purse strings for a LEA or RBC I would seriously ask myself that question.

There also needs to be a set of audio and video exemplars up of people who have used Moodle in the UK schools sector and a quick down and dirty toolkit for heads to get a grip on this subject.

Heads are all already reeling from initiative overload and for the DfES to do this is naughty, naughty, and in the light of the e-strategy document, I'm afraid they speak with forked tongue on this issue. Senior management will grab a solution if it "appears" to lighten their load in the short run but it is the sustainability issues that are of concern here. So a "pack" for senior management (and I mean 1 or 2 pages written in simple English) to come up to steam quickly and efficiently would be a godsend.

The problem is that BECTA looks at the whole spend in terms of commercial parameters and doesn't see the costs go on services and CPD in the Open Source model - they have to issue an OJEU under the parameters they have set - and they have buried their head in the sand over Open Source. In fact the Open Source model is more sustainable and this is what needs to stressed again and again to senior management. Do you want to buy something that you will have to pay out for year on year for licencing and CPD costs extra or do you want a system where you can put a top quality professional development structure in for the allied costs.

So first - heads need to know what a VLE is (and the spec for the parameters hasn't even been released yet!) because most of them do not have a clue in the schools sector and secondly an exemplar site of how to spend the money and what the benefits are in the long run strategically need to be pointed out.

I think this whole policy is totally shortsighted and selling our children short in the schools sector. People just haven't thought this one through and I am fuming really.

Personally I see no issue with commercial service providers bundling Moodle if that is the only way it will get into schools. At least people will get to see the model and it would be a way of mainstreaming it. But the same issues arise.

Hi Mandy,

I think we look towards two or three approaches to seeing Moodle continue in maintained schools post 2008.

I'm hopeful that by v2.0, Moodle will meet most of Becta's functional requirements (the latest draft is at http://www.moodleforge.org.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=212 - registration required), and that there'll be some commercial suppliers interested in using it as their LP of choice for the framework agreement, and thus funding the development of any requirements that aren't covered. Afterall there are commercial advantages for them in doing so.

I'm still not clear if an LA can use its LP funding for Moodle hosting, development, training and content; I believe that EU competition rules suggest that they can opt out of framework agreements as long as they can demonstrate that the minimum functionality is met and they obtain better vfm, but I'd be grateful if someone could clarify this.

Funding to schools for LPs will not be hypthocated, and schools can therefore choose not to buy-in to the LA/RBC provided solutions - and if we can get the message across about how much better Moodle is, as Leon suggests, then I think there would be significant numbers choosing to opt out. I believe that there are people in the DfES who are worried about this. Of course, even if they do go with the LA/RBC solution, there's nothing to stop them setting up a Moodle box as well. Furthermore, increased autonomy for schools is fairly central to the Schools White Paper. It's possible to perceive some tension here between the IT bits of the DfES and the rest of the department/government.

Building Schools for the Future impacts on this as well - under BSF, IT infrastructure is provided through a managed service, which will be constrained by the functional specification, and I guess by the framework agreement.

Following Leicestershire's possible misrepresentation of the DfES's position on learning platforms, a clarification statement has been issued to the industry via the Technical Subgroup site, they explain that:

"the mandatory and recommended functionalities that industry providers must be able to deliver to be included in the framework agreement do not also serve as a list of functions that schools, procuring from the framework, must purchase in entirety. Schools may choose any combination of functionalities from the mandatory and/or recommended lists to suit their needs. They might even choose functionalities not currently listed"

Which goes a long, long way to address my and others' concern that the voice from the classroom hadn't been listened to. Of course it could be no other way, as most of the funding for this is to be devolved down to school level through devolved funding capital and revenue funding, and won't be hypothecated. As the Becta requirements and specifications are not statutory, schools could disregard these if they wanted, as the DfES acknowledge elsewhere in their statement. In summary:

"On the basis of how best to develop learner-centric teaching, schools need to be thinking about, planning and deciding whether or not and how best to use ICT to support their vision and aims."