Open-source software has proven to be cost-effective wherever it has been implemented, including the education sector.

For the first time, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) has taken to open-source software as against proprietary software such as Microsoft Office.

This year, Open Office, an open source software suite, has been installed in computers in 419 state schools, with which the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan has made a saving of Rs 53,63,200.

“Earlier, we used to procure Microsoft Office, and the vendors quoted us Rs 2,560 per unit. By doing away with that, we have ensured that we save a lot,” said Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Programme Officer H B Chandrashekhar.

While cost is the obvious guiding factor, Chandrashekhar said that open-source software like Open Office is also beneficial for educational purposes.

Open to Easy Understanding

“Contrary to popular belief, open-source software also come with easily understandable features. Most importantly, open-source software is free,” he said.

This year, 335 schools (with additional 84 schools) under SSA’s Computer Aided Learning scheme will get five desktops and one UPS each. The operating system on these desktops is the popular Windows 7. “The initial idea was to have Ubuntu (a Linux-based operating system) bundled with Windows 7. However, we feared that lack of training in open-source platforms would lead to confusion among students and teachers,” he said.

Chandrashekar added that introduction of Linux-based platforms was also being discussed in the Technical Approval Panel (TAP).

With the introduction of Open Office software suites in school computers, the District Institutes of Education and Training (DIETs) will play a major role in ensuring teachers and trainers are acquainted with open-source software.

‘Important to Education’

Speaking to Express, DSERT Director H S Rama Rao said, “DIETs will train teachers in both MS Office and Open Office. I believe that open-source is important in education, as computer literacy is not the sole objective. Open-source becomes an aid to learning as well.”

Source:http://ibnlive.in.com/news/software-sans-royalty-for-education/227605-60-119.html

The website of Carnegie Learning, a company started by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that sells classroom software, trumpets this promise: “Revolutionary Math Curricula. Revolutionary Results.”

The pitch has sounded seductive to thousands of schools across the country for more than a decade. But a review by the U.S. Department of Education last year would suggest a much less alluring come-on: Undistinguished math curricula. Unproven results.

The federal review of Carnegie Learning’s flagship software, Cognitive Tutor, said the program had “no discernible effects” on the standardized test scores of high school students. A separate 2009 federal look at 10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading found that nine of them “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”

Amid a classroom-based software boom estimated at $2.2 billion a year, debate continues to rage over the effectiveness of technology on learning, and how best to measure it. But it is hard to tell that from technology companies’ promotional materials.

Many companies ignore well-regarded independent studies that test their products’ effectiveness — Carnegie’s website, for example, makes no mention of the 2010 review, by the Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse, which analyzed 24 studies of Cognitive Tutor’s effectiveness, but found only four of those met high research standards. Some firms misrepresent research by cherry-picking results, and promote surveys or limited case studies that lack the scientific rigor required by the clearinghouse and other authorities.

And school officials, confronted with complicated and sometimes conflicting research, often buy products based on personal impressions, marketing hype or faith in technology for its own sake.

“They want the shiny new one,” said Peter Cohen, chief executive of Pearson School, a leading publisher of classroom texts and software. “They always want the latest, when other things have been proven the longest and demonstrated to get results.”

Carnegie and its peers

Carnegie, one of the most respected of the educational software firms, is hardly alone in overpromising or misleading. The website of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt says that, “Based on scientific research, Destination Reading is a powerful early literacy and adolescent literacy program,” but fails to mention that it was one of the products the Department of Education found in 2009 not to have statistically significant effects on test scores. Pearson’s website cites several studies of its own to support its claim that Waterford Early Learning improves literacy, without acknowledging the same 2009 study’s conclusion that it had little impact.

And Intel, in a Web document urging schools to buy computers for every student, acknowledges that “there are no longitudinal, randomized trials linking eLearning to positive learning outcomes,” yet nonetheless argues that research shows technology can lead to more engaged and economically successful students, happier teachers and more involved parents.

Carnegie officials say 600,000 students in 44 states use its products, many taking teacher-led classes three times a week with Carnegie-provided workbooks, and spending the other two class periods in computer labs using Cognitive Tutor. The full curriculum can cost nearly three times as much as a typical textbook over six years. Officials declined to release annual revenue figures, but Carnegie Learning was acquired in August for $75 million by the parent of the for-profit University of Phoenix. Carnegie Mellon University, which had retained ownership of the Cognitive Tutor software and licensed it to Carnegie Learning, earned an additional $21.5 million from the sale.

Steve Ritter, a founder and the chief scientist of Carnegie Learning, said there were flaws in the What Works Clearinghouse evaluations of Cognitive Tutor, and disputed the Education Department’s judgment of what makes a worthy study. “What you want to focus on is more of the why,” he said, “and less of a horse race to find out what works and doesn’t.”

The hard sell

Shelly Allen, the math coordinator for public schools in Augusta, Ga., has seen a lot of curriculum salespeople pass through. She is wary of their sweet words and hard sell.

In June, when representatives from Carnegie Learning visited, Allen warned: “I just want everybody to know I grew up here. I graduated from here. My children go to school here. When you guys get back where you live, our kids have to still be able to reach goals we set.”

Augusta’s public schools are typical of struggling urban districts. Three-quarters of the 32,000 students in the district, Richmond County, are black, and 72 percent are poor enough to qualify for the federal lunch program. The mean SAT math score last year was 443, below Georgia’s mean of 490 and the nation’s 516.

Six years ago, the district adopted Cognitive Tutor for about 3,000 students at risk of failing, paying $101,500 annually to use the software. As students work through problems, the computer analyzes their weaknesses and serves up new items, until they grasp the skill and are allowed to move on. To a student, the promotional materials say, it feels “as if the software is getting to know her and supporting her like a tutor.”

“Immediate feedback,” Carnegie Learning explains on its website, “enables the student to self-correct and leads to more effective learning.”

Augusta officials liked the program enough that, when concerns arose last winter that many 11th graders were not on track to pass a new state graduation test, the district asked to expand the software’s use to all 9,400 of its high school students. The company agreed to provide access for no additional charge — temporarily.

“As a company it makes sense to give you the opportunity to prove it works for all students,” Anita Sprayberry, a regional sales manager, told school leaders. That way, she said, “We can talk about a bigger sale.”

Going forward, Sprayberry said, the cost would be about $34,000 for each of the district’s 11 high schools.

In a recent interview, Allen said she was familiar with the What Works Clearinghouse, but not its 2010 finding that Cognitive Tutor did not raise test scores more than textbooks.

Though the clearinghouse is intended to help school leaders choose proven curriculum, a 2010 Government Accountability Office survey of district officials found that 58 percent of them had never heard of What Works, never mind consulted its reviews.

Evaluating curriculums

Founded in 1998 by cognitive and computer scientists along with math teachers, Carnegie Learning is proud of its academic heritage, and many education researchers consider it a model of rigor and transparency.

One founder, John Anderson, received the 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science for work on how humans perceive, learn and reason. The company’s website promises that its curriculums “provide the research-based foundation for proven results,” citing “success stories” from around the country.

At Dundalk Middle School in Baltimore County, Md., for example, Carnegie Learning says that Cognitive Tutor led to an increase in the passing rate on a state assessment, to 86 percent in 2004 from 49 percent in 2002. What it does not say is that the rate remained at 85 percent last year, even though Dundalk dropped Cognitive Tutor in 2007 because of difficulties arranging lab time.

That is why many academics dismiss case studies: It is too easy for slices of data to be taken out of context, or for correlation to be confused with causation.

Karen Cator, a former Apple executive who directs the Office of Educational Technology at the Department of Education, said the What Works Clearinghouse reports on software should be “taken with a grain of salt” because they rely on standardized test scores. Those tests, Cator said, cannot gauge some skills that technology teaches, like collaboration, multimedia and research.

Real-time assessments

In Augusta, Allen, the math coordinator, said her district did not have the means to study the effectiveness of Cognitive Tutor formally. But she and her staff saw that low-achieving students who used it were able to join mainstream classes. And teachers appreciated the way the software transmits assessments in real time to Carnegie Learning, then kicks back a report indicating the strengths and weaknesses of each student.

Teachers “just didn’t know, skill by skill, the same type of data they are getting now,” Allen said. On the other hand, when the new state math test was given in March, 27 percent of the district’s 11th graders did not pass, which Allen described as “something that makes us not real excited.”

At the June meeting with Carnegie Learning’s sales team, Allen said Cognitive Tutor could be worthwhile if the district — which recently cut $7 million from its budget and furloughed employees for nine days — could scrape together the financing. “Our negotiations are intense because we don’t have any money,” she said to laughter around the table.

In Georgia, where the state negotiates prices with publishers, an annual license for Cognitive Tutor software is $32 per student, and the workbook, which must be replaced annually, is $24 — for a total of $336 over six years, a typical lifespan of a math textbook that costs about $120. Ultimately, Allen’s district did not have the money, so she focused on getting the most out of her staff. “Giving them the right tools and resources certainly helps,” she said, “but our teachers are the ones making that difference.”

Source:http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20111010/NEWS0107/110100354/

Mtelegence Corporation has been awarded a Phase II SBIR contract from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) to develop Readorium, a web-based software solution to help middle school students comprehend non-fiction text in the area of science. There have been major breakthroughs in educational research in terms of teaching nonfiction comprehension, but too often, middle school teachers are forced to cover large amounts of new material in 40 to 45-minute class periods, and lack the time and resources to teach literacy strategies effectively. Mtelegence strongly believes that Readorium, when fully developed, will help huge numbers of struggling readers understand complex text and become skillful and enthusiastic reading detectives.

Harriet Isecke, Mtelegence co-CEO and the Principal Investigator of the Readorium project points out that, “Middle school is a pivotal time as students are exposed to increasingly challenging content material. Teachers expect students to make the transition from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn.’ This transition is often unsupported, and students flounder. Students who struggle with literacy skills cannot perform well in school and run the risk of becoming disaffected. Reading failure is the main reason that almost seven thousand students, on average, drop out of US high schools every day.”

Readorium uses an engaging game-based economy to teach struggling readers in grades 6-8 how to use scientifically-proven strategies to construct deep meaning from text based on the National Science Standards. Enrolled students can use the program from school or home and may access help features such as word definitions, etymologies, and scaffolded multi-modal hints. Animated e-tutors guide students through interactive strategy lessons, gradually helping them become more self-reliant as they read. All text is written on 12 different readability levels, and the text that is presented to students becomes incrementally more complex as they gain the necessary skills. Readorium keeps track of student responses, time on task, and their use of hints. The Teacher Management System gives educators complete access to individual and group progress reports and to lessons and activities designed to help them tailor classroom instruction to students’ needs.

“Readorium computerizes these best practices and presents them in an engaging, adaptive format where students not only learn how to comprehend text, but they also learn science in sync with their school curricula and with the National Science Standards,” commented Attila Medl, Mtelegence’s co-CEO and the co-Investigator of the project.

Source:http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/386064

A private foundation is giving the state $25 million to better track student achievement and fulfill a cash commitment toward Idaho’s education broadband system.

The investment from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation was announced Wednesday and includes $21 million for the Idaho Department of Education to pay for software designed to improve the performance of students and teachers.

The software is designed and distributed by SchoolNet Inc., a private New York company.

The SchoolNet tool will improve the way schools monitor real-time student progress and teacher effectiveness, said Albertson Foundation Executive Director Jamie MacMillan.

“The foundation has always believed that it was important to move toward a more informed, accountable and transparent education system where data is used to make timely decisions that benefit student learning,” McMillian said in a statement.

The SchoolNet tool will be an extension of Idaho’s new longitudinal data system, which was designed to collect and monitor individual student test scores, attendance and other data from the time they enroll in kindergarten. Idaho was the last state to install a longitudinal data system.

With the new software, teachers will be able to cater lesson plans to individual students and develop tests based on a single lesson to see if students retained the material, said state Department of Education spokeswoman Melissa McGrath.

The new software program dovetails with the education reform plan that public schools chief Tom Luna championed during the 2011 Idaho Legislature, McGrath said. The reforms were signed into law earlier this year and shift money in the public schools budget for salaries to fund technology upgrades in the classroom and a new teacher merit pay plan.

Idaho will phase in laptops for high school teachers and students, under the plan.

“This is related to the reforms because we really want teachers to have more technology in the classroom that will assist them in raising student achievement and this type of technology is critical,” McGrath said.

The grant money will also cover the remainder of the foundation’s $6 million pledge toward the $60 million cost for installing broadband infrastructure statewide for the Idaho Education Network, a project to link public schools, universities and businesses across the state.

Source:http://www.dailyjournal.net/view/story/3ea18d6cc5b04a81b09ddf91e4319d90/ID–Education-Grant/

As the ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ (CSR) movement gains momentum worldwide, there is also a pragmatic realization among companies that it is important to align such initiatives with the core business and invest substantially in such projects. A good example of how CSR may be made complementary and synergistic to your business came from MetaQuotes Software Corp. recently.

Known as the global leader among providers of online trading platforms that facilitate foreign exchange brokerage (given its popular products MetaTrader 4 and 5), MetaQuotes launched the TeamWox Groupware as a tool for companies to automate the business process, optimizing both production and management.

Using TeamWox, a company can organize its entire operations, make them more transparent and hasten decision making based on full and authentic information. The system comprises popular business components such as a Docflow, Customer and Vendors Relationship Management (CRM), Personnel Management, Collaboration and Accounting modules and is a very effective management tool in the hands of small and medium businesses (SMB).

Now, based on an analysis of why educational companies were lukewarm in their response to the product, which has been so enthusiastically embraced by the management in other diverse sectors, MetaQuotes has launched a worldwide social initiative under which it has pledged to provide TeamWox to any educational institution, absolutely free of cost.

“Educational institutions are almost the same as commercial companies in organizational terms. They have big staff strength, a lot of “paper work”, periodic group events to be organized – all of which could be managed effectively with TeamWox, leading to reductions in both cost and time,” says Renat Fatkhullin, CEO of MetaQuotes Software Corp., “but we found that many of these enterprises could not afford a product such as this as they mostly do not operate as strictly commercial organizations. That is when we decided to give them the product free.”

Thus, the free version of this commercially successful and very functional software was made available to any organization that has a valid license for educational activity, issued by the relevant governmental regulatory body. The offer is open for an unlimited number of users and has no time restrictions.

This, however, is not MetaQuotes’ first brush with education per se. The company maintains and develops several websites aimed to provide free education in the field of automated trading on the financial markets. They even pay for the user-generated content in these sites so that any community member with strong knowledge in the field may write for these sites and get paid for that. This model has helped MetaQuotes build a substantial library of unique information that the public can access for free.

The company has also sponsored some online books in this field. Once again, it publishes these books on the Internet for free and anybody can download them for use. Given its clearly rooted philosophy of furthering the cause of education, it is perhaps not surprising that the offer of TeamWox was extended to the sector in particular.

The current initiative was launched first towards the end of February in Russia, the homeland of the TeamWox developers, where it received a warm response. Fifty educational institutions in the country had already applied for this version, provided copies of their educational licenses, and received the free software before the company announced the offer globally.

Users have been benefited by many of its features, which they feel have systematized their operations to a large extent, making many internal processes, tasks and projects faster and more controllable.

Nickolay Nickolaevich Bakushin, deputy director of facilities management at the experimental Moscow-based high sports school “Khlebnikovo”, cites the example of the email management system which has helped them so much. “We can now immediately assign a received email to an executor – instead of waiting for a director’s endorsement, making several copies and bringing them to relevant responsible specialists. I love this one-click solution. The director receives all emails and appoints the responsible employees, which is then clearly traced in the history,” explains Bakushin. He also finds himself more in control of execution by people to whom he would have delegated certain tasks; the mobility that the system offers to a manager who may be physically present elsewhere is a huge plus as well.

For the school of management thought which believes that business-aligned social initiatives are more effective in creating true impact and less likely to be ephemeral, MetaQuotes clearly sets a sound example.

Source:http://hken.ibtimes.com/articles/123720/20110317/metaquotes-metatrader-operations-management-corporate-social-responsibility-csr-groupware-teamwox-ed.htm

Google is talking with makers of educational software to help build a marketplace for online learning programs, an industry whose value may approach $5 billion this year.

Games and instructional tools for teachers from companies such as San Francisco’s Grockit Inc.

and Aviary Inc. are already offered in the Google Apps Marketplace, an online store that opened in March.

Google seeks to lure more educational developers, company executives said.

Software sales for colleges and kindergarten through 12th grade this year should surpass the $4.6 billion in 2009, according to Parthenon Group LLC, and become a growth area for Google, which gets most of its revenue from search advertising.

The company works with schools, providing free word processing, e-mail and spreadsheet programs.

Source:http://story.malaysiasun.com/index.php/ct/9/cid/d805653303cbbba8/id/41583405/ht/New-store-for-education-software/