olcinm

Which VLE? Studywiz Inhouse or Hosted? Hosted What percentage of Teachers are using the VLE, 10%, 50%, 90%?? Varies per school. Some schools are over 90%. Top school last month it was 93% of 40 teachers. 25% of our 406 schools have at least 33% teachers using the system. The average across 406 schools is 15%. That was 1787 teachers out of 12065. We do have some non-users and we are trying to target those to find out why. More importantly IMHO is the % student use. Our top using schools regularly get over 80% of students using the system. Top school last month was 92% of 410 students. Average for the 406 schools is 19% of students. That's 15174 out of 78388 students. These % figures have been fairly consistent and plotted over the 2.5 years since we went live with 12 pilot schools slowly rising. Though we do get dips of course in holiday periods and when we've had interuptions. Roll forward in September for example (Still a largely manual process as we develop our identity management and provisioining processes). The success (and it is a success compared to many LA roll outs I know of) is down to the training programme (and superb trainers - teachers) and continued CPD and training programme. The VLE itself didn't get in the way much IYSWIM. I'd also like to suggest that being primary school focused (87% Infant, 93% Junior, 94% Primary, 3% Secondary, 38% Special) also makes a difference. How easy is it to administer? Most primary schools teachers have little problem but we have a centralised provisioning process. They still can create manual accounts for adults not in the MIS ie. governors but not parents. We're still working on the latter as we have schools that want parent access to their child's work via a personal account not only MIS data. Does it integrate with the MIS properly? If by properly you mean programmatically our deployment does for accounts/groups but not attendance, assessment, behaviour data. Currently we supply SIMS Learning Gateway for that in secondary schools. Is it expensive ? No it's definitely at least half the costs of a school procuring something similar themselves. Economy of scale. Schools lose some flexibility and independence but gain in savings and in being able to collaborate with other schools more easily. What do you use if for, - notices, lessons, homework, quizes, coursework, revision, reporting to parents? Huge variations across schools. Main uses are managing learning resources presented to childern. providing homework/extension work, some schools manage their teaching (lessons) out of it, many schools use the forums and chat rooms with students lots and lots. For some reason primary schools (and sixth form colleges) are less afraid of this than secondary schools in my experience. Online testing is less popular though the integrated games are. The gallery activity with its ability to hold any files not just images is very popular. The ePortfolio and personal blogs are underused but growing. If you want to see what our schools have done have a look at some of our articles on Issuu Issuu - hampshireit's Profile e.g. EdICT News Spring 2010 - page 5 or EdICT News Summer 2010 - page 5 or Hampshire IT Schools Autumn 2010 - page 5 amongst others. HTH

Hello - Thanks for that. Is that they "recognise the importance" documented somewhere other than here?

Well I voted for Moodle. But I agree with those that said it depends. Moodle is not great for infants IMHO. Studywiz has a pretty good primary interface based around the idea of a lesson or topic rather than a course. However once you get into the activities (tests, assignments, forums etc. it is just like Moodle but worse. Not very good implementation of the TinyMCE Editor (Much better in Joomla for example) and poorly laid out forms especially in the tests. There is a QTI assessment activity that is more flexible but it's implementation is too esoteric especially the editing of questions. Moodle is way ahead on anything else regarding testing and it's implementation of Ajax for drag and drop is getting better by the day. What it is missing is the big graphic/type interface. Key to any VLE is the content libraries and examples of it being used for full courses or topics sets. The best Moodle examples I have seen are at Alton College but like the Open University Moodle courses they do tend to be wordy text and graphic "books" online rather than interesting use of tests, forums or wikis. If you are a primary school and want to see good use of Studywiz I'd suggest asking at Hampshire. One of the great things about Moodle is it's shareable scales and gradebook. But that doesn't do image scales yet and some VLE vendors for primary are. You know being able to set up a traffic light system or smiley system for rating or grading things. moodle also lets you apply its editable scales toi any rateable/gradeable activity. i've soome really clever uses oif this. Studywiz has an activity called gallery that was originally just an image gallery tool. Buit it does now let you have a gallery of any type of file. Once they get these files producing useful thumbnails or other visualisations of say mp3 files or documents it will be even better. Where Studywiz falls down is its handling of comments, forum threading etc. The ePortfolio tool and ILP/Personal Learning Plans tools are good though and ePortfolio will be even better in 9.4 as its structure becomes editable. Some Local Authorities have bought it for their schools (Unlike Oldham). Yet to see it used in anger though. Haven't used Frog but seen lots of demos and talked with the developers. It's seems a very flexible system but I haven't seen any demo that shows a school using it's full potential. I'd also be concerned about how supportable it would be if you let your techies loose creating forms and data sets that are just too idiosyncratic. The advantage of a fixed structure is clearly the way in which everyone can see the same thing from school to school etc. If you put yourself in the shoes of a year 6 pupil moving from junior to secondary or a teacher working in more than one school, having an LA "standard" solution makes sense. Collaboration and sharing of activities can work better too. Secondary schools do tend to be a bit like islands sometimes. I also have some sympathy with the lets just use lots of web 2.0 free stuff etc. But how sustainable is that and again what about the kiddies. They are not all brilliant at adapting despite the fact they are digital natives. My 3 teenage sons are OK and comfortable with ICT but they really do take ages to do somethings that should take minutes. And I think that's because they don't spend enough time learning a few apps (online or otherwise). Yes we have to be able to transfer skills but someone who really knows an app will knowck spots off the person with broad knowledge when it comes to getting a specific job done swiftly. So again I think standardisation does help. Sharepoint? Well it is really Microsoft's best bit of software IMHO and I reckon it will become a stadard portal into which VLE vendors and MIS vendors will plug in. Problem with that is which forum tool do you use? The VLE one or the sharepoint one? Which survey tool? Which gallery tool? Which wiki tool? Which messaging system? There's a lot of doubling up in the Sharepoint with VLEs plugged in via web parts. And you will also have at least 3 databases (MIS/Sharepoint/VLE) maybe 4 if you count the messaging one if its a separate email system like Exchange. But boy is it resource hungry, slow to render and costly to licence and maintain and develop/skin. Just look at SIMS Learning Gateway to see how badly Capita have skinned Sharepoint. Why not? Maybe it costs a lot. (And WSS is not free - you are paying for Windows Server are you not?) Maybe not too hard to maintain if you don't bother about backup, disaster recovery and don't do anything complex with groups and integration but wait until you've got an SQL database that has been going for a few years without proper clearing out of old stuff. Maybe one server per school is reasonable to support but try setting up an LA sized Sharepoint implementation with full school level restore points and data that's built up over a few years. Then tell me its not costly to maintain. ANd wait till you start to really get parents online with it having to maintain accurate login details handing out passwords etc. etc. TBH I have yet to see a really good scaleable Web 2.0 like drag and drop, aninmated, mashable easy for non-techies to do nice graphical stuff type VLE.

Hi I think this is fairly typical of many secondary schools but I am surprised you are using it from year 1. Does no-one else think this is a bit of an eSafety child protection issue? If I am reading this right, knowing your pupils' username means you know their age, full surname and can probably guess the firstname. If it's possible in the VLE or via an email domain to also know the school then it's open to providing more information about my (say 10 year old) child than I as a parent would want. We made a decision to not disclose age in the usernames and as little of the real name as possible within the constraints of needing to make them memorable and not having too many duplicates. We also are considering a local authority email domain address. We have potentially 500 000 (500 thousand) users for our Learning Platform and the pattern we have adopted means we need to include 3 hex digits to prevent duplication allowing for redundancy after 10 years. Its surname up to 7 characters, initial and 3 hex digits. We did an exercise where we tried various patterns with the name of every child in the county and discovered the most common username was duplicated 105 times with no digits and yes it was smithj. So allowing for 4 times as many (2 parents and a similar number of teachers that's 420ish max. Using 3 hex digits gives us 4096 duplicates. We think we are safe for 10 years before we need to reuse a smithj000. We also made a decision to make them usable even if you move from being a student to being a teacher or back without needing to change the username or email address. (We'd be scuppered if every learner went on to require a teacher or adult ed account but not likely is it). In fact the pattern may even be adopted for citizen usernames for Government Gateway but then I think there could be problems with duplication.

Not necessarily. Moodle can export tests in several ways. If I was you I'd at least export them in various formats including doing a CSV dump via MySQL. You may have a problem with images or other files used in tests. I know there was a QTI import plug-ins for Moodle and so maybe there is a QTI export by now? All Becta framework platforms have to support import of QTI standards assessment items. HTH

Having read the wording of the press release I was assuming that this would essentially be Capita Web Parts working in UniServity rather than IMS or SIF transport and Uniservity interfaces to Assessment Manager and Lesson Monitor? Although I thought Capita took a decision not to licence web parts to Learning Platform suppliers for potential escalating support reasons? If it's a SLG Sharepoint Portal solution with Capita and UniServity Webparts then I guess a lot of the agreement may centre around Active Directory provisioning, structure and management. Any VLE that has web parts could work alongside SIMS Learning Gateway webparts but there would have to be some other form of logic to get the data to mix in a proper interoperability fashion. SIF zones are surely the way ahead for this, not the IMS point to point route We all await the Becta/DCSF decision. Maybe it will arrive in time for the SIF Quarterly meeting who knows? Becta might. Where does this partnership leave the SIMS Learning Platform aka Learnwise? Lets not forget there are several Learning Platform vendors working towards Capita SQL read/write partnerships via business objects. The list is here but there are companies who are progressing this but not on the list yet. SQL Technical Partners - Capita Education Services It's going to be an interesting 12 months......

Hi Phil These are important points that I'm sure Capita and others must have raised with SIFA UK. Totally agree about the mandate but I'm not totally clear on the financing needed. If the DCSF and Becta mandate SIF for Learning Platforms, MIS systems and census returns presumably by absorbing the data model into e-GIF and aligning it with CBDS then won't suppliers have to finance developments or get out the market? Ownership of data as data controllers is very important but lets not for a second imagine that schools already conform. The reality of what already happens with data taken out of SIMS is far from kosher. I'm glad Capita are looking into the legalities of this. But isn't this in reality a bit like closing the door after the horse has bolted? There would need to be legal agreements and a framework for sharing data. Isn't this what MIAP are doing? If the data can be exported easily into other MIS systems doesn't it make it easier for a school to change MIS suppliers and doesn't it mean that functionality in the MIS may become functionality in the Learning Platform instead? Doesn't this make Capita a bit nervous? Why do Capita muddy the water with things like curriculum and lesson planner. Surely that's a Learning Platform function? Anyway lets see what happens this year shall we. Anyone want to open a book on a DCSF announcement about SIF in 2008?

My understanding is that Becta are pushing for SIF to be put into e-GIF if you read this http://www.clip.local.gov.uk/lgv/aio/41579 To quote it Couldn't agree more but are there enough of the strategic people in schools at all aware of any of this. I think not. I know some geeks here will have the ear of their SMT but many don't. Not really. AFAIAK SIF is an open standard and it's use in the UK as pushed by Becta is for lots of things not just vertical data movement. The Birmingham PoC did user ID provisioning for the Learning Platform. I believe Becta are considering ways of SIF being used for ID provisioning supporting UK Federation Single Sign On use particularly where the Service Provider may need more attributes than the UK Federation currently support. Let's not forget that MIS<>MIS is the main reason for SIF. Even the IMS Global document states that if you read the SIF entry in their best practice document at http://www.imsglobal.org/enterprise/entv1p1/imsent_bestv1p1.html#1404177 My view is that Becta would like nothing better than getting open systems and standards at the core of data interoperability in the UK. But is this what Capita want? They will lose market share. However seeing as even Microsoft have decided they need to change their stance (see http://209.34.241.68/gray_knowlton/archive/2008/02/21/microsoft-on-interoperability-significant-strategic-change.aspx ) I guess Capita will also have to embrace this. For example supporting more document formats and office systems than simply Microsoft Office. Interestingly it looks like SIF and SCORM may be getting together too as SIFA and ADL have announced a partnership. See http://jwsifblog.blogspot.com/

In my PC mag this month there was an article about Vista templates needing editing on a Vista workstation not the MS server 2003. Is this true or has this been overcome with any patches for Server 2003 from Microsoft yet?

Anyone seen any signs of the MLS webparts that use silverlight?

I have been led to believe that some web parts can run on any dot net framework without MOSS 2007 as long as their connectors for data are allowed for in any particular on-line environment. So for example some of the Capita Web Parts for SIMS can be put into UniServity's platform which is not Sharepoint. It all depends on what the web part does, what libraries it depends on and what the application inside the web part requires for connectors. Another example may be the MicroLibrarian web parts that use Silverlight I think. Could be that they can run in a dot net framework rather than needing Sharepoint. Sharepoint MOSS 2007 costs quite a lot to licence and support. Sharepoint Services are a "free" option if you have MS Server. Shame we haven't got a single standard for p[ortal technology so that all these providers web parts/portlets/blocks/properties etc. could work in each other front end. We've got so many layers of technology these days, absolute nightmare... but then we have choice... sort of....

4GB RAM for how many concurrent assignment processes? Looks like SLK may have some scaling issues for say an LA that wants to roll out MOSS 2007 and SLK across lots of schools (Say 300?) I wonder if any of these services have really been tested for this kind of taffic. My experience says that ,most schools don't do the assignment stuff much yet but if they do start to use it alot then any learning platform that needs to scale up to LA size needa architecture that separates out the process to different schools etc. Hosted solutions that aggregate schools like UniServity, RM Kaleidos Portal Plus, StudyWiz could really struggle with assignment handling in a school setting where everyone wants to set up timed stuff at fixed times during the day. We all know how the log in or printing struggles without load balancing DCs and localised printer servers. Perhaps currently there's not much of this happening on their servers and perhaps there never will? I think the vision for an on-line, any time anywhere on-line learning space for kids with ePortfolios that take multimedia and on-line assessments that use multimedia will have to really get the architecture right the more we centralise. Maybe we shouldn't be centralising and Moodle on the LAN with Moodle networking peer to peer is best after all?

Certainly look interesting from a school point of view. Seems a bit Capita SIMS focused as the FAQ only mentions SIMS Business Objects. I wonder how data is extracted from the other MIS systems? Whilst we are in this phase tools like this are vital but I wonder if they will become redundant as we move more into a dynamic framework for data sharing "IF" SIF and LA controlled data sharing takes off?

Shibboleth is only going to get you trusted federated authentication not account creation and what about the rest of data interoperability like assessment, attendance etc. How will you or your LA fling that about? The thread says data extraction so I guess we're not talking about data going back into the MIS but don't we really want data unification with several authoritative sources etc. What experiences does anyone have of either BizTalk or Identity LifeCycle Manager (ILM) from Microsoft? Are these the ways in which you will get the accounts or are you so small and uncomplicated in Bradford that you can have a big Active Directory forest from school LAN up to LA? Some LAs have huge numbers of schools linked by varying connections and with a myriad of MIS systems and LAN directory systems. Secondary schools are less likely to want to lose directory control on their LAN and the structure of say a AD with 500+ schools carrying the attributes necessary for Shibboleth authorisation into lots of different services could be really difficult to manage. What an LA has to do is find a solution that works with several different systems. Its fine for school IT staff to get solutions working for them but kids move in and out of schools and colleges, staff can work in more than one school, SEN provision has special demands on data, parents can have kids at more than one school. Identities need to work inside several LANS and on the Internet and need to be moved between lots of partners. Yes this is scary and there are all the scare stories about centralised government IT data secuiryt issues. Who owns the data? The MIS provider, the DCSF, the school, the Network Manager, the teacher. Anyone asking the parents and children? If we can help kids, parents and teachers from constantly filling in on-line and paper forms but instead data checking and updating on-line then great. But of course we have to get the security right. The responsibility for the data being verified shifts and the validation becomes simpler (less often). The issue are always going to be around money and people. And the biggie is who gets the blame when something goes wrong.... Who in school is currently responsible for data security? Are they really in danger of losing their job if the data gets in the wrong hands or is lost because it's not been backed up properly. Is this a shared responsibility, do we really have this all written down, explained, discussed and signed up to? If the LA is going to take on a more centralised role for data (identity, content and other data) then the balance of responsibility shifts and heads will role if it goers wrong. Wouldn't many of rather it was someone else's problem? As long as the identity doesn't stray into the financial and stays in the educational then we may be OK but whatif the system starts to include school dinner money or trip or uniform payments? Would you want the educational identity connected to the financial one? This is the way we are heading and I for one would not want to be the bod in a school looking after that lot.

UniServity seem to be winning a lot of LA contracts. This could be because they have a good presentation team or because they can convince people that they do understand education. Key to use in primary school BY pupils including those that are just learning to read is the interface. This comes down to configurability and simplicity but even more so to the editing tools. A bog standard WYSIWYG (almost) HTML editor just does not cut it. What about cut and paste for graphics, painting tool so I can paint my contribution in a forum or audio input without the need for paint/record > save locally > click insert > find recording (click/click/click!) and click upload. Something like the flash based honeycomb system from SoftEase or 2Simple Java tools are what's needed.