Learning Management System (LMS) provider Alpha Learning (AL) has sent a letter of complaint to Mrs Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Competition, alleging that Becta's Learning Platform Framework Agreement broke OJEU (Official Journal of the European Union) procurement guidelines and has stifled competition in the UK education software market.
AL alleges that the companies appointed by BECTA (Azzuri, Etech, Fronter, Netmedia, Pearson, Ramesys, RM, Serco, UniServity and Viglen) submitted applications that didn’t meet mandatory criteria in the original tender documents. AL’s complaint is also the result of advice they received from the British Office of Government Commerce.
AL say that BECTA has systematically failed to implement technical interoperability standards for educational software, creating an inefficient market which it says makes it very difficult for BBC jam to fulfil one of the fundamental charter commitments set by the DCMS.
This is a complicated issue, with AL focusing on the difference between Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) and LMS and on two specifications, SCORM (Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model - a standard established by the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative) and Simple Sequencing (established by the IMS Global Learning Consortium).
Unfortunately, using BBC jam as part of their argument undermines AL’s case because BECTA’s Content Advisory Board has already noted that the BBC’s user authentication system is incompatible with the open source system (Shibboleth) used by every major VLE.
In their letter to Mrs Kroes, AL also say that due to interoperability issues, the Digital Curriculum (BBC jam) has been suspended pending a review. In fact what seems to be happening is that the Content Advisory Board, supported by BECTA, is currently reviewing a few of BBC jam’s projects that were due to be released before Christmas. According to the BBC’s Head of Education, Richard Pietrasik, ‘BBC jam is very much alive and with many new projects still under evelopment. The investigation by the CAB only affects a small number of commissions that have had their release date postponed. However the overall project is still moving ahead as planned’.
After BETT we tried to confirm the details of the investigation with Pietrasik, but he was unavailable. The reply we had came from Paul Almond who wrote, ‘We haven't had formal notice of any complaint, but we understand that the European Commission and Government are aware of concerns which some in the industry have raised about the role Jam is playing in the market’. The BBC jam team will get little sympathy from the software industry if their budgets are cut as a result of the recent licence fee settlement.
It seems that AL think they will have more success if they drag BECTA, rather than the DfES before EU regulators. While AL’s specific claims about the Learning Services Platform Agreement look weak, we are glad they have had the courage to say in public what many IT companies have been saying in private for some time. Namely, that BECTA’s procurement systems and Framework Agreements have limited choice and innovation in the UK market and that rather than facilitating better IT use they have actually hindered it.
