Debian just announced last week that Skolelinux will be deployed throughout the German federal state of Rhineland-Palatinate as the official operating system for schools. As I work part-time in the neighbouring state of North Rhine-Westphalia as second level IT support, I am very interested in this development. In my environment, the landscape is still very much Microsoft-dominated and I am curious what we can learn from this project to improve our own situation.
According to the report, Skolelinux (which is being developed by the Debian Edu project) was first installed as the main operating system in eleven pilot schools with the goal of eventually being adopted by all 1,700+ schools in the state. Dipl. Ing. Klaus Knopper, founder of the well-known Knoppix distribution, has been appointed as one of the leaders for the undertaking which includes reintegrating teaching materials produced by the schools back into the international Debian-Edu project. It looks like Rhineland-Palatinate, together with the state of Hamburg which has also been introducing Skolelinux into their schools, is moving to the forefront of open source adoption in the educational sector here in Germany. Both of these federal states are considerably smaller than my own home of North Rhine-Westphalia, but that should not rule out the possibility of following in their footsteps and since educational policies are governed by federal legislation here in Germany, the decision ultimately lies with the state-level officials although a lot of the responsibility, especially concerning IT policies, seems to be delegated to the individual school districts. It remains to be seen if a state-wide program like this is the best way to enforce these kinds of changes. Working on the ground for a third-party contractor supplying first and second level IT support throughout all school models myself, I am primarily interested in the day-to-day challenges that a switch to an open solution like this would entail. I am sure I do not have to elaborate why I think a change like this would be a very good idea indeed, the cost-saving benefits are immediately apparent and as far as the political and philosophical reasons are concerned, just listen to me on any episode of Linux Outlaws and you’ll get the gist of it. But on the flip side, a fundamental policy change always has problems associated with it as well: Habits have to be changed (probably the biggest “cost” of such an undertaking), people have to be educated, barriers of all kinds that you never knew existed before have to be circumnavigated — not to speak of all the raw work involved in changing the software itself…
What I am most interested in is how the organisers of this project have managed to introduce Linux on the desktop. When I still worked in schools in Cologne, we were almost exclusively using SuSE or Ubuntu servers for years but the desktop clients were all Microsoft. Over here in Bonn, even the servers are mostly running Windows but previous experience has already proven that moving the servers to Linux would be almost trivial, indeed one would think it to be a no-brainer (somehow the decision makers don’t seem to see it that way though, apparently schools desperately need Active Directory services). Moving the desktop over seems to be a much harder task in any case. I have no knowledge of the state of educational software in other locales, but if you have ever used a piece of proprietary learning software over here, you will know that these are the worst pieces of code you could possibly find — I frequently ask myself if they pay poor Educational Science students with no programming knowledge whatsoever five Euros an hour to write this stuff in some dark closet or if these companies just outsourced it all to some small island off the coast of China. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Chinese but I am very positive that neither they nor Educational Science students can write decent educational software tailored for German schools for five Euros an hour, especially if it is mixed with cheerily-insane images of Peter Lustig and singing dogs. One company used to publish a suite of applications for several primary school subjects (German, English, Mathematics etc.) that you’d think were meant to be installed alongside one another on the same machine but when you actually tried to do that you would find out that they all used the exact same Windows registry keys which would make it impossible to install more than one program of the suite at the same time since the second app you tried would always think it was installed already. When I called that company’s tech support to tell them of this behaviour, they claimed it was “intentional”. You can not imagine how often I have to resort to the good old face palm on a typical day at work. Seriously, give me a burgundy shirt and I look like Captain Picard with an elaborate wig at times. All I am trying to get across here, I guess, is that this software hardly runs on Windows without a hitch (most of it actually has a lot of problems with Vista), porting it to Linux would be a Sisyphean task. I therefore wonder what they did in Rhineland-Palatinate to solve these problems. The state could well have changed its curriculum guidelines to use only the software provided with Skolelinux although that does seem a bit unlikely. Switching everything to open source or even free software (servers, clients and end-user applications) sounds like an amazingly good idea to me, though, and I am ready to predict that they will have a lot of success with this. Using LTSP would be even better, although I might loose my job due to the fact that you could cut the administration overhead down to where one person could support 100+ sites single-handedly. Like the schools in Rhineland-Palatinate, many educational institutions in my area are already using free and open source end-user applications like Firefox, Open Office or Moodle but the key is replacing the underlying proprietary operating system (in this case Windows) as well — if only to save the federal state, districts and schools huge amounts of licensing costs. Everybody in this field knows how tight the budgets in education are, it’s time we acted on this knowledge!
I will try to find out more about what our neighbour state is doing with this project and how they are carrying out this policy change in detail. Careful analysis should reveal how school districts everywhere could follow their lead. As I’ve hinted before, the biggest obstacle will always be the end-users (not necessarily the kids but mostly the teachers) who in general are very hostile to change of any kind. Teachers like to complain that they are understaffed and outfitted with sub-standard materials but they never seem to connect that to the thousands of Euros the authorities are spending each year on Windows licenses for their school. For precisely that reason it will always be the most important work in any undertaking like this to educate users on the ground about the potential benefits of open source solutions first and foremost. A mandate from higher up like in Rhineland-Palatinate does help a lot to get the ball rolling, though.
