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Open Schools Alliance event: Part I
I’m still catching up, but as promised, here are my notes from the Open Schools Alliance event last Friday. Due to the length of my notes, I’m splitting this up into several parts to be posted over the next couple of days.
The Open Schools Alliance have a tricky balancing act to pull off. There appears to be a natural inclination towards giving what is effectively a monopoly to Microsoft in the education market, they have to lobby hard and loud. By doing so, they risk being labelled “religious zealots”, as indeed some have labelled them in the past. This event though was positioned as a way of making educationalists aware of the landscape of open source in schools and aimed to educate and inform rather than proselytise.
Well, that was until some people got stuck in during the afternoon panel session, but we’ll get to that in Part III.
Martin Douglamas, the founder of Moodle – the most developed and widely deployed of the open-source VLEs – was present and gave a run-down on the history and possible future of Moodle and its partners. The open-source business model they’ve adopted is pretty interesting: the code is owned by a trust that is sustained by donations and contract services, but partner organisations can get official recognition as long as they drop 10% of their profit around projects back into the trust. It’s like an open-source, anarchist (in the political sense) multi-national that works. It’s possible this is one future of open source economics.
Martin talked about the scalability of an open source model: 200+ developers which even commercial VLE providers would struggle to match with their exorbitant pricing models, and the relatively flat structure.
What really interested me though was the plans to introduce “community hubs” into Moodle. Teachers in schools in a given geography are likely to be teaching the same curriculum material in a similar style, yet they are all independently creating the same content. How best could you organise it so that once a module was in the system, it could be shared by all teachers teaching that module? The answer will be a hub where courses can be shared (or charged for) amongst a group of people with the ability to connect to that hub. Bottom-up hierarchies: you’ve got to love it.
