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school website yourself. What will you write today's school news to be?Miles Berry tells the learning platform gag better than I
Those learning platform service providers in full...: "
Fellow fans of The West Wing will be familiar with the notion of 'Take out the trash day", on which public announcements are made at such a time that they get lost in the midst of other events and thus perhaps miss the media scrutiny they deserve, not dissimilar from Jo Moore's notorious "A good day to bury bad news".
On the Friday just before Christmas, Becta made public the names of the ten companies that are the approved suppliers under the LP framework agreements. They are:
Azzurri Communications Ltd
Etech Group
Fronter
Netmedia Education
Pearson Education Ltd
Ramesys
Research Machines plc
Serco Learning Solutions (Serco Ltd)
UniServity
Viglen Ltd
It comes as no surprise, although still a disappointment, to see that these are pretty much the usual suspects, with, as far as I'm aware, no open source suppliers on this list - thus schools, teachers and pupils are going to end up with learning platforms that lack the flexibility to adapt to a their own way of working. Interesting that some of the big names like Blackboard, MS and Capita aren't there either though: I suspect that in the case of BB and MS the hoops really didn't seem worth jumping through.
The fears expressed in EDM 179 seem entirely well founded now, and this short sighted approach to procurement is likely to do little for SMEs, or provide best value.
Becta's Stephen Lucey claims that
"purchasers can be confident they are buying robust and sustainable technology and services which give value for money",
which I suspect will be far from the case considering that the market might well not be able to sustain ten competing suppliers, particularly alongside popular and effective free alternatives, and the amount that will have to be spent on licence fees. Yet again we see the implicit assumption that these are products to be purchased!
Becta also claim that there was a rigorous, comprehensive (!) and
"intensive evaluation programme covering technical, commercial, value-for-money and quality assurance elements"
- such a shame that they didn't bother to look at the impact that these products would actually have on learning and teaching. And indeed that their notion of comprehensive effectively excluded open source software and SMEs.
Of course, as the DfES have acknowledge elsewhere, there's nothing to stop a school or local authority running its own procurement process, or using Moodle in house - the decision as to which VLE to use will, I believe, rest with headteachers, at least until BSF rolls out."
Knowing the technical competence levels of quite a lot of teachers, knowing how disinterested they are in computerising their teaching... This is going to be a long hard road to adoption and buy-in.
I know that some person at an LA will be sold one supplier or another, not on the brilliance of the service, but on the salesperson's personality. Thus, these large(ish) supplier will add a whole LA's list of schools to their client list. The fact that only maybe 10% of that LA's schools take up the LA's chosen solution, and even then, only half of those will actually buy-in to the solution, that is, actually use it. Then they've got to use it frequently and well.
I know this from experience. See the list of frequently updated sites in the left hand column? Half of my schools use it well. As I look through these supplier's websites looking at their mentioned schools, schools that should be good demos for their products, I struggle to find anything that I consider good, let alone outstanding. Most of them are abandoned. Some are infrequently updated. Nothing, nothing, nothing outstanding!Now obviously, I can't see what's happening with the learning platforms, I can't log in, I can't ask a child, "is it good, are you enjoying it, are you learning." I can only see the school's front facing website. To me, this speaks volumes. If the front website looks dull, uninspired, likely the hidden learning platform is too.
For little old me, I'm proud of the schools that are using my stuff and open about the schools that aren't. Also, we're not a Learning Platform, at least not in BECTA's definition. We're a front facing website solution, and a way to deliver parts of the curriculum.
