In our long running battle to find out what’s going on behind the scenes at BBC jam, we have finally struck gold with BECTA’s response to our FoI request. Naturally there was less information than we had asked for, with BECTA arguing that certain information was withheld as disclosure would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice and views’. Full disclosure may be uncomfortable but with the bill for BBC jam likely to be £100m, BECTA, the BBC, DfES and DCMS all seem to have forgotten where their budgets, salaries and consultancy fees come from – taxpayers and businesses.

The documents we received were either the notes from meetings of BECTA’s Content Advisory Board (CAB) or between the CAB and BBC staff (never BBC Board members). Some of the more interesting snippets from these documents include the following quotes:

• ‘CAB members remained some what disappointed with what they viewed’
• ‘little in BBC jam is likely to challenge and engage young people over a sustained period’
• ‘little more than a text book replicated online’
• ‘some fundamental expectations of (BBC) jam are not yet part of the service’
• ‘content shown does not appear to exploit much by way of the rich BBC archive’
• ‘the engagement of teachers, subject associations and academic researchers has been somewhat superficial. Student involvement to this point appears to be patronising’
• ‘there was a significant lack of understanding of the (eLC) market and how it works’
• ‘while not doubting the (eLC) figures collected by the DfES, a credibility gap remains between what is reported and what is perceived as happening.’

Hardly inspiring, although the CAB do hold out the occasional olive branch, such as, ‘the BBC are getting better’. One of the themes which runs through all the documents is research. The BBC has commissioned the University of Lancashire, BECTA is working with Futurelab and CAB want to spend £25k (out of a budget of £105k) trying to define what complementary and distinctive mean. This research is a significant additional cost, the majority of which will not come out of the budget for BBC jam. To try and reduce the strain on the public purse we would be only too happy to lend the CAB our copy of the Oxford English Dictionary for free!

One fundamental problem with BBC jam which does emerge from these documents is that ‘users’ (students) in ‘educational institutions’ (schools) who log onto Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) all use an open-source authentication standard called Shibboleth. Unfortunately, the BBC uses a different (incompatible) system making integrating BBC jam into VLEs and then recording what users do, or don’t, pretty much impossible. It might be possible if the BBC start using Shibboleth but this would require a high-level policy change, presumably by the new BBC Trust. As interoperability with VLEs is a basic requirement of BBC jam, it’s unlikely to meet one of the DCMS’s fundamental criteria but the likelihood of the new BBC changing its IT security system to accommodate the project is less likely than a return of Michael Grade.

When the CAB saw three new sample programs in August; their assessments ranged from:

• Good - a video editing product based on Strictly Come Dancing, to
• Concerned - a religious education project, to
• Disappointing - a conservation game called The Operatives.

All in all BECTA’s documents shed little light on BBC jam and its struggle to commission distinctive and complementary content. What we have seen will hardly allay the fears of private sector producers and investors, but we have to applaud BECTA for at least responding to our FoI request; but perhaps they have less to lose than the BBC, DfES or DCMS?

www.becta.org.uk
www.bbc.co.uk/jam
http://shibboleth.internet2.edu