P7280348 by remiforall, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
It is a particularly ambitious project that Audran Le Baron, director of digital for education at the Ministry of National Education, presented on May 19 in Strasbourg. He spoke by recorded video, at the national Moodle seminar (Moodle is an online learning platform – see Wikipedia -, under the free GNU GPL license, integrated since 2020 into the interministerial base of free software). He presented the work in progress of his administration, relating to free software for the container and shared knowledge about the content.
“A digital commons in the purest sense of the term”
In the excerpt tweeted below, about the Eléa project (e-education platform initially set up by the Versailles Academy), he says:
“We are in the process of building a digital commons in the purest sense of the term. I say that because the term ‘digital commons’ can sometimes be a little overused. There it is not at all. We are building a platform based on free software to which we will contribute by returning the source code each time we make it evolve with the Moodle community. And this platform will be made available to the entire multitude of teachers, who will be able to create their courses, share them, share them with free access, free to reuse with free licenses at stake where each teacher will be able to come and collect content, reclaim it, modify it, improve it and pass it on to the entire community.
But if I had a dream, it would be to build in five years, to have built in five years, the Wikipedia of educational resources for French programs, where each teacher can reuse the content of others, improve it, donate it to the community. This is the very definition of a digital commons. This is the dream. This is the objective that we can set collectively.” [NB : ces deux dernières phrases ne sont pas dans l’extrait, mais dans la transcription intégrale]
The speech was posted under a Creative Commons license on the channel @Edu_Num of the instance #PeerTube of @education_gouv
The excerpt chosen by @LeLibreEdu allows both to measure the progress made and to make an appointment for the future.https://t.co/tdPGAxxPim— Alexis Kauffmann (@framaka) May 25, 2022
Interoperability and pooling
Audran Le Baron’s entire speech was transcribed on Libre à lire (a – very useful – April site). It specifies in particular:
“the need, for me, to build an offer around Moodle which is at a national level. As you know, it is not enough to use a Moodle engine to allow full interoperability of all content, to allow sharing of this content between teachers, in the four corners of the territory, at any time, or to allow sustainability, continuity throughout a professor’s career in access to these resources because a professor transfers, can go from one academy to another, suddenly change platform. So as long as we don’t have a unifying national tool, well, we will have breaks at the same time geographical, temporal or in terms of interoperability.
This is precisely the raison d’être of the IAM program which was launched just before the crisis, in 2019, and which had, for me, two main objectives:
• on the one hand to form a community of Moodle actors, to form this community to put all the actors in synergy and to allow, in fine, a democratization of the use of Moodle;
• the second objective is to pool the resources produced by the teachers and to converge all the technological solutions on the basis of Moodle.”
For the Director of Digital for Education:
“Third message that I wanted to convey to you, the absolute necessity that we have to co-construct together the trajectory of generalization, deployment, national scale-up of the Éléa project whose DNA is the user experience; it’s something I care about a lot.
The opening of Éléa will obviously be done gradually, in a concerted way, academic region by academic region. We will have to establish together a convergence strategy which will be based on your expertise and this is where we will need the expertise of all of you during this seminar, with technical subjects and subjects of organizational order.
Mention is made in particular of the list of plugins and interoperability formats to be able to ingest external content, support for users – first and foremost teachers.
Sources
The full video of Audran Le Baron’s speech
His transcription
Read also
Microsoft and National Education: Anticor files a complaint – May 15, 2022
National Education: 12 free digital projects – April 3, 2022
Free education: Alexis Kauffmann, founder of Framasoft, joins the Department of Digital Education at National Education – September 5, 2021
Teachers and Wikipedia: Do as I say, not as I do – March 4, 2013