Re: [Fsfe-uk] Education Campaign?

[Alex Hudson]

On Tue, 2003-04-01 at 08:11, Marc Eberhard wrote:
> On another matter, does anyone have any contacts with LearnDirect?

Yup, me - the company I work for was talking about designing some
courses for them a while back (it never happened, for various reasons).

> I was
> very surprised to learn, that their online courses only work with Microsoft
> Windows.

That's not strictly true - their platform spec calls for Macs to work
also, and Netscape 4. But, they do re-negotiate the spec on a
per-project basis. The environment is pretty harsh, though - for
example, you cannot do any server-side processing at all. Hence people
tend to use heavy-client plugins, like Flash/Authorware, Java, etc.

Most of their projects don't require renegotiation, though. Their
half-decent stuff is done in Flash, but there's not much of it - pretty
much the ESL stuff only.

> only Windows for their e-learning efforts. Obviously their IT course are
> only based on Win-Software, but they do also offer non-IT subjects. And I
> would really like to see these being available to non-Win users. Anyone any
> experience with them?

Their courses aren't particularly amazing, and because of the way that
they are setup and funded, they don't have much incentive to renew their
courses and keep them up-to-date.

In fact, they only tend to generate courses when the Government dangles
a project in front of them (like the Literacy & Numeracy campaign,
English as a Second Language, etc.). And - I *believe* - very few, if
any, of the courses are actually accredited anywhere.

I guess there is room to do something progressive - like, providing
Learn Direct with some learning modules about Free Software to integrate
into their system - I'm just not sure what their incentive would be.
Their priorities are mostly funding related... I guess the obvious
solution is that we could try to find some European funding to do a Free
Software version of the EUCDL or something, that would likely catch
their attention. Perhaps we should have a go at doing that? I would be
interested in being involved in such a project, although I probably
don't have enough time to do much myself - I do have plenty of contacts
within the relevant industry, though, and could even help if people
wanted to the push the course for accreditation (which would be a *big*
win). Perhaps this should be an "official" project?

Cheers,

Alex.

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