A demonstration version of the UK's first government-backed
national open
source IT project, is to go live in two weeks' time.
The National Digital Resource Bank (NDRB) will provide content
for
digital learning systems to schools free of charge.
The move comes after increasing cross-party political support
for the greater use of open source software and open standards in
public sector.
The system will benefit all UK schools that have invested in
digital learning systems, but do not have content to fill them.
The content repository is the first UK national project to rely
entirely on open source, open standards and open content.
The NDRB is based on open source digital content repository
software funded by the Spanish government and released under the
open source General Public Licence version 2 (GPL2).
The bank of resources including tutorials, games, photographs,
audio clips and worksheets, is available free to any organisation
willing to contribute their own publicly funded resources.
The NDRB will initially offer £30m worth of publicly-funded
content. It is expected to grow rapidly as schools joining the
scheme add their own content.
The system is scheduled to be open to local authorities from
July, and schools from September this year.
The system will be managed by the
North West Learning
Grid, which has run a pilot programme in the past 18 months,
with technical support by open source supplier Sirius.
Gary Clawson, chief executive at the North West Learning Grid,
said the NDRB is the missing link in UK digital resource
strategy.
He said although many schools have computerised learning
systems, there has been no way of sharing content because the
systems were not interoperable.
