AOC Nilta, BECTA and Open Source

AOC Nilta have produced an excellent response to the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) Learning Platform Functional Requirements and Learning Platform Technical Requirements. There are some really excellent features of the program overall, from both a teaching and pedagogical standpoint, but unfortunately the technical requirements are written is such a way that no open source projects are likely to meet them in the near future.

The central issue, of course, is that the BECTA model of spending IT money is centred on paying a commercial company for licences, hardware, training, support and installation, and because of previous bad experiences these commercial companies are required to be of a certain size and age. This doesn't sit well with open source projects, whose focus is on small groups, communities and informal consortia. From the report:

Another concern is whether the vendor-only Learning Platform Framework process endangers the delivery of the functional aims in terms of sustainability, learner collaboration and citizenship skills and education?

The consultation framework excluded Open Source Learning environments and products from consideration because the business processes and models used by the open source community, which radically differ from the practises of commercial companies in terms of development, support, and dissemination, were not recognised as legitimate or sustainable by the Becta framework. Single open-source products or combinations of open source products which deliver the Becta’s functional specification are not eligible for consideration.

AoC NILTA is concerned that while the specification seems to recognise and support the pragmatic and practical ‘small pieces loosely joined’ framework that many institutions work with and around, the criteria and bidding process seems to stymie openness, collaboration and sharing, by tying individual institutions, or at best, local consortiums of institutions, to vendor contracts. By discounting open source solutions from the evaluation process, Becta is ignoring current excellent practice which has worked precisely because of the absence of licensing restrictions.

cheers, stuart