That’s Edutainment

The Guardian reports today that the BBC’s Jam pro­gramme, pre­vi­ously known as the Digital Curriculum, has been sus­pended thanks to the European Commission. This was a project that has already spent a £150mn budget, all of it licence payers’ money.

As you know, I worked pre­vi­ously in edu­ca­tional pub­lishing. I’ve spoken with a lot of key players in the area. They opposed the BBC entering the cur­riculum software pub­lishing space — four years ago when the Digital Curriculum project was launched — because it would hurt their business. A government-​​sponsored business in the UK like the BBC shouldn’t do that, of course, even if they were better resourced to do so. So the powers that be came up with a fudge.

That protest sparked the eLC (e-​​Learning Credits) scheme, whereby every school (about 32,000 in the UK) received £1000 a year, plus about £3.50 per pupil — every year or less — as a ring-​​fenced grant. They had to spend this money on content (i.e. stuff about Geography or English, not applic­a­tions or oper­ating systems). It’s still going until October 2008, even though Jam has been canned. The schools didn’t actually want this money. It takes time and effort to learn new software and being forced to buy £1000s of it each year wasn’t helpful. Nonetheless, that pro­gramme has run for three years and runs still. Many schools found ways to spend the money on other items that they did need (“We can do you £2K worth of software and it comes with new PCs”); others simply wasted their budgets in fear of losing them ([to a software pub­lisher] “Can you send us another £500 worth of your stuff? No, we don’t care what it is.”) Otherwise, it’s creating an arti­fi­cial economy for edu­ca­tional pub­lishing that will crash just as it did when the money ran out for BBC com­puters in the early 80s.

At the same time, the BBC was plugging away at its Digital Curriculum, which it launched at the BETT show last year to wides­pead amazement at how they’d spent so much money on so little content — five or six games, as I recall. More was coming, we were promised. We were all won­dering how much money they’d paid to come up with the name ‘Jam’ and a new logo.

So, at the same time that the Government was awarding monies to schools to buy software they didn’t want, they were also spon­soring the BBC to produce online software that the schools didn’t want. And now — ah ha ha ha — the whole thing’s been binned.

The entire enter­prise is quite clearly a national — and now European — disgrace. Teachers need training and time and better money, not more ‘stuff’ created because it suits the private sector’s or the BBC’s objectives.

I’m outraged. And I dread to think about the dirt that will even­tu­ally emerge con­cerning the BSF ini­ti­ative.

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