I often wonder what makes something best practice, surely not simply
because lots of people do it.
I can understand the Becta point of view with open source. There are
huge issues to do with support and training which are generally provided
by commercial organisations. It is very difficult to imagine a small
school coping without a great deal of backup.
If you look at the Moodle help pages you will see hundreds of requests
for help. Some of these have lots of answers but many of the answers do
not actually help and are often contradictory. Whilst those of us in
larger FE/HE establishments might have the staff to cope with this, many
schools do not. I have been trying for several weeks to improve the
performance of my Moodle server with frequent 'help' from the Moodle
site but that is not the same as someone coming out and doing it for me
and accepting responsibility for it.
It may be that as Moodle moves forward and it becomes commercially
viable for companies to provide support (I have heard of one who already
does) that it may become possible for an organisation like Becta to put
forward it as an alternative but that will never be the case for open
source products in general.
Moodle was our first branch into open source and it has, largely, been
very successful but it has raised some serious issues as well. These are
largely about support. Whether the Linux community likes it or not, many
ICT Support staff do not see learning how to use programs like PHP,
Apache and MySQL as worth the effort or as a career progression.
Tim Harrison
-----Original Message-----
From: Virtual Learning Environments [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of niki lambropoulos
Sent: 28 September 2006 11:45
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [VLES] LEA Advises against Moodle!!?? - what do you think?
Hello Peter,
I think it only shows that Quality frameworks need to be revised in
order to include best
practices in the field. what do YOU think?
>
> What do you think?
>
>
>
>
>
> "AoC NILTA - ups its game with a constructive critique of Becta's
> learning platform procurement documents" from
>
> (http://fm.schmoller.net/2006/09/impressive_work.html )
>
> "Response to Becta's Learning Platform Specification
> <http://aocnilta.co.uk/2006/09/13/learningplatform/> . This longish
> piece gives a balanced assessment of the functional and technical
> requirements specifications which Becta has issued - recognising their
> strengths, but pulling no punches on Becta's hostility to Open Source:
>
> "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 practices 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.""
>
>
>
>
>
> This email is confidential to the intended recipient(s) and represents
the views
> of the sender and not necessarily Bromley College of Further and
Higher
> Education, which accepts no related responsibility.
>
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