Resources

Merlin John

As millions of pounds of Government cash are invested in learning platforms that may, or may not, be bought into by teachers and learners, grassroots developments with open source software in UK schools are starting to show startlingly cost-effective uses of ICT that are extending teaching and learning to homes and improving results.

Cottenham Village College in Cambridge now runs its entire online teaching, learning and home community – 1,500-1,600 users - on an open source system currently costing just £6 a month for server space. Yes, the technology will have to be ramped up as demand increases, but in the course of just one year, it has saved around £40,000 on hardware, software licences and other e-mail costs alone by using Google Apps for communications and collaborative work.

Google has given the school the best e-mail system it’s ever had – easy to use, robust, with chat facilities ideal for online help, and availability at school or home 24/7 – and it’s absolutely free. However, most of the excitement within the school, and the interest from other schools, is not actually about Google (most other schools already have e-mail and are not yet aware of the potential savings) but for the way Cottenham is developing the open source Moodle software for its virtual learning environment (VLE).

Head of ICT, Dan Leighton, now has all of the ICT curriculum online. So his lessons are all supported by online activities for school and home. His Moodle set-up is structured so that all students are clear about what is required of them and how they can achieve and progress (a ‘traffic light’ facility takes them through exam criteria). In the course of our interview he demonstrates the flexibility and transparency of the service as he fields online queries from students, and coaches Tom, online and in person, who is anxious to complete his ICT work so that he can finally leave school.

The feedback is immediate and collegiate in a way that can only be achieved when the curriculum goes online. No lengthy waits for teachers to work through piles of marking – when work is marked a student gets an automatic alert on his or her Gmail account. And Dan can instantly access the whole range of student work from his desktop.

These developments have sparked massive interest from outside the school. The Cottenham website – which actually is the Moodle - gets half a million hits a month, and the Moodle conference it ran with the Cambridgeshire Moodle Network and the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust in July was attended by around 60 delegates from across the country. This has nourished a can-do culture of confidence. Dan Leighton explains that this is because every incremental improvement is soundly based on teaching and learning.

Deputy head Peter Marshall, who is responsible for the school’s ICT, says that he had originally been looking for an “uber” application – software that could cover the school’s every communication, office and curriculum need. Working with Dan Leighton brought him to the point where he accepted that there was no single solution of sufficient quality to meet all the various needs identified in the school. Google and Moodle are now seen as two very useful technologies in a wide range that could support teaching and learning.

What Google gave Cottenham, from a standing start, was quick, effective, easy-to-use, quality communications, calendar and shared documents. Microsoft Office is also used throughout the school but Google Apps ensures that documents can be used and shared in all homes, not just those that have access to Microsoft. “We haven’t found anything that we have wanted to do but couldn’t do in Google Apps,” says Peter Marshall, “and you can share everything, easily allowing for new approaches to collaborative learning in a wide range of subject areas.”

This instant, popular take-up increased confidence in ICT for both students and teachers and is regarded as key to the successful embedding of ICT. It opened the way to curriculum innovation with Moodle. “Google is like the telephone line and Moodle the directory and marking book – the structure for the teaching and learning,” says Dan Leighton.

“If you have a reliable e-mail system which you know works, and which you feel confident in, all of a sudden your online communication becomes natural. It’s the combination of both the things: totally reliable e-mail and communications system which we know will work; and one that the kids will want to access because they’ll enjoy using it – and that’s a crucial issue – because it’s really good. They are not suffering by coming into school and using an inferior system, which was what they previously had to do. Because the communication was sorted, we could then start using the other online learning tools in a confident fashion.

The ICT curriculum is now online and other departments are joining, understandably at differing stages of readiness – science, PE, DT, construction and humanities are all starting to make more structural use of the system as a key tool for learning rather than simply as a repository for information sharing.

In an education culture constantly looking for evidence of improvement, Dan Leighton is happy to share the external moderation data for the new Vocational ICT course that Cottenham is teaching using the online systems to manage the teaching and learning. The moderation suggests that when results arrive for this course in August they should gain above 90% As and A* in double GCSEs (three sets with 100% As and A* and one other set with 75% As and A*).

The innovation is perhaps most apparent in the way in which the new intake is prepared. Over the summer term they are brought in to their new school for a week. They have their own secure website where they can raise their concerns about issues like mobile phone use and bullying in forums (Moodle of course) and have them answered by older students. During their ‘fresher’ week they are given Google Apps accounts which they can use to communicate with their new friends over the summer.

The experience of developing their own, successful open source system has given Peter Marshall and Dan Leighton the kind of independent views that are valuable for any educator working in this area. They could easily hold their own with any proponent of commercial communications and ‘office’ software, and the VLEs on the Becta framework list, and are excellent ports of call for anyone under the illusion that open source and Moodle are out on a ‘techie’ wing of ICT.

Both are down to earth in their insistence on the centrality of teaching and learning rather than the technology or policy twitches. On national agenda issues like real-time reporting, and the move from VLEs to MLEs, Peter Marshall says, “Cottenham doesn’t see a great deal of clarity in current policy on real-time reporting or a deep-seated understanding of the role of assessment for learning and the power and the meaning of those communication lines that might be established electronically or otherwise. We hold great stead in some of our traditional policies and procedures. And we’ll make changes only where we see clear, identifiable benefits to our students and our parents, and we tackled this directly with Becta recently at a very good meeting.

“My advice to any school wanting advice would be to stand back and not to rush to the published deadlines for these procedures but to focus first on good assessment, on good reporting, on what you are saying and when you are saying it and what the value of that conversation will be. And then worry about whether doing it electronically genuinely adds to the quality of that provision or not. We are a massively switched on school in technological terms at this stage and it’s largely down to the work that Dan has done, but nonetheless we are not going to be first on the wave to start pushing all of our reporting in all of our subjects online.” Any implementation should be “careful and well considered”, he added.

Cottenham uses SIMS pupil information and feels that a meaningful integration of that data will come in time. “One thing that’s good about Moodle is that if we want to make a considerable change to it, for example to link SIMS attendance data, it’s going to be perfectly possible. Somebody somewhere will develop a module and will make it available in the open source community and we’ll adopt it. That’s one of the things that we like about it. (“We would do it ourselves if someone would invest the money,” quips Dan Leighton.)

“That’s such a significant difference from buying into SIMS Gateway products or Microsoft Sharepoint products where there is undoubtedly going to be a sort of ‘per school’ fee for incorporating new elements,” adds Peter Marshall. He asks, “Is this is just another vehicle for companies to exploit a policy-driven need?”

Cottenham has its own wishlist for Moodle – with ease of use, design and interface at the top – which it is confident will be come into play through the right partners and investors for a system focused entirely on secondary schools’ needs. Its wishlist for Google – better group work and integration with Picasa (picture service) for example, which is apparently well on the way.

Dan Leighton concludes: “Education is not a cash cow. It’s not there to provide profits for all those companies who charge an arm and leg for their services. Why not come together, put some money into it, develop whatever is needed and then give it away for free in the same way as Google has given away Google Apps. They both work on a similar model. There is a philanthropy there, about Google and Moodle, which means that you are delivering something that is usable and free at the end point, or at least free to obtain even though it does cost you in time and resources. What you are doing is putting your money into training staff to use a tool rather than paying money into someone’s pockets just to get access to the software in the first place. And that’s a very big deal.”

Schools like Cottenham Village College highlight a significant gap between aspects of top-down national policy on ICT – the learning platforms and e-portfolios specified by Government schemes for example – and the grassroots developments springing up at school level and coordinated through the open source movement. They are establishing the fact that open source software like Moodle has an important role to play, and Cottenham’s adoption of Google in particular has produced substantial savings and a step change in school-community communications that deserve a wider audience.

top of page