Case Study: Orwell High School — migration to Linux was a 'no-brainer'
Although many schools may be reluctant to try open source, one school that has taken the plunge is Orwell High School, a secondary school in Suffolk that has around 850 pupils aged between 11 and 18.
The School's deputy head John Osborne says that the decision to move to Linux was easy, once it analysed the potential cost-savings. "When we did the sums and looked at the [open source] software and its reliability, it was a no-brainer. Schools who have visited us have thought the same thing," he says.
Orwell High School started deploying thin-clients running SuSE Linux 9.1 in summer 2004 and is now running 350 thin clients. It replaced Microsoft Office with StarOffice, Microsoft Publisher with Scribus and is using the HTML editor Quanta and the image manipulation tool Gimp. The school is also running Windows Terminal Server so that the Linux-based clients can still run Windows-only educational software.
Deputy head Osborne says the school has saving a considerable amount of money by moving to open source, by cutting down on licence, support and hardware costs.
"We're saving huge amounts of money now. Our annual budget is around £30,000 per year. In the past, the entire budget was used just to keep things going, now we've been able to buy more laptops and more thin clients," he says.
The school was able to easily convert all the machines it already owned into thin clients by adding a network card to the computers that didn't have one, and also converted a batch of second-hand computers donated by Credit Suisse into thin clients. With the money it has saved on software licensing, it has bought Sun Ray thin clients, which have the additional advantage over converted fat clients that they are silent, produce no heat, and only use a fraction of the electricity. The school has also been able to provide every member of staff with an individual laptop running StarOffice.
Software licenses accounted for around half of Orwell School's budget in the past. As well as Windows and Office licences, which cost around £35 per desktop, it was also paying around £2000 per year for a Symantec antivirus product, and thousands of pounds a year for a RM Ranger product to lock-down workstations. Now, as it only needs to license one copy of each product to run on the Windows Terminal Server, its total software budget is only £400 per year. This amount will be cut back even further soon, as the school is planning to move to DansGuardian, an open source Web content filter.
The school is also saving a considerable amount through the reduced cost of supporting thin clients. Osborne claims that he would have needed a "team of technicians" to support 350 fat clients and the staff laptops, but only has one technician. The thin clients are easier to support as they run software from the central application server and students cannot change the local environment as there is no hard drive.
"The thin clients are proving to be staggeringly reliable — we are spending only three quarters of an hour every week maintaining 350 clients," says Osborne. "Before, the big problem was security — students downloaded software so we regularly had to wipe the hard drive and start from scratch. We were running 20 types of computers so ghosting an image was difficult, which meant that reinstalling the software took a couple of hours per machine."
The use of thin clients has also extended the life of the school's current hardware. "We used to get only three years out of each machine — the software gets bigger each time it comes out and the hard discs in the computers have a limited life," he says. "Some of our thin clients are now five or six years old."
Talkback
What an Irony ?
This article is partailly covered with Microsoft ad
Good evening,
After reading your piece "Open source in education: Winning hearts and minds" I'm left with a question: When was the last time Ovum analyst Gary Barnett used Linux or open source? As a Linux migration specialist and open source advocate working with public schools in the US, I have found very little open source software could not accomplish in both usability and features. The OpenSuse project has put out an amazingly easy to use desktop OS where networking, desktop navigation and ability to "surf the Web and write documents" is as easy or easier than the latest offerings from proprietary companies. Does Ovum have any alliances with proprietary software companies?, would be my follow up question.
That being said, please feel free to explore my links to educational open source software, where over 600 individual education focused software projects are listed thanks to Seul/Edu. http://www.aptenix.com/education.html
If you have any further questions or need for resources when writing about the state of open source in education, feel free to contact me.
--
Chris Gregan
Open Source Consultant/Founder
Aptenix LLC-Desktop Solutions
New Market, MD
(240)422-9224
Not only is the Ovum rep clueless about Open Source, he is also clueless about schools. The reason school s used Acorn technology in the past was simply it was better for what they wanted to achieve and RISC OS was more advanced as a user interface than Windows 3. The main reason why mass migration to Open Source hasn't happened is simply confidence. The biggest influencer in that would be government and agencies like BECTA providing the required leadership. Instead of spending £100m a year on curriculum on-line which entrenches the status quo spend 50m on open source development projects and 50m on the curriculum on-line. That gives equal funding to the two development models. In 3 years I think we would find that there was no need at all for the COL database.
Schools are also wary about being seen as 'doing the wrong thing'. If you teach kids how to use a word processor and for your particular purposes you chose OpenOffice, you may have some fear of parents howling at you about 'not teaching WORD' and then you'll find yourself trying to explain that the program itself doesn't matter one bit and that it is the concepts that matter. Aside from all that, most people are hesitant to change until someone forces them too. Now and then you have extraordinary individuals who see that things can be done better and push for change - and these people really are extraordinary. For example, let's say one teacher wanted to use FreeDuc (www.ofset.org) because it's got all these neat learning tools suited for kids 6-12. Questions come up: who will support it, etc? Although it runs off a CD, it's far too inconvenient to boot from CD, save setting to a floppy, etc. You have a computer tech, but one who sees his position as just a way of paying the bills (some people are incredibly lucky and have competent techs who love their job and love being part of the education system) - so there's no hope of getting the tech to set up a system (not that he/she could).
There's never a shortage of problems that come up - so the best thing to do is read comments to see if there's something you haven't thought about and then push on with your plans for world domination by penguins,
One open source product which is being used increasingly in schools and colleges in the UK and abroad is Moodle - a Course Management System which is similar to a Virtual Learning Environment.
A number of educational insititutions are actually moving away from proprietary VLEs to use Moodle. This is as it's in many ways more userfriendly and it has features which have to be purchased as add-ins from other companies.
I would like to find the jobs that are paying Junior Techs £18K and Senior £35K!
Schools, in theory may have an independent budget, but their local authority can have quite an influence especially if they have no one to support Linux. Also, there is the shear inertial required to be overcome in any change. On top of that with the pressure on schools to 'perform' few will want to upset the teaching - learning balance by introducing new technology. Especially when it will be the staff who have the steepest learning curve.
Finally who would finance the training, both time and money, of the technicians?
Open source should be mandated by Governemnt and LEAs wherever possible. I dont want my taxes funding proprietary and closed source dead end solutions that have to be discarded every few years.
I’m a student at Orwell and my experience of open source through school hasn’t won my heart or mind. I have Mandrake on my laptop, but school was a nightmare. After struggling with a poorly implemented system for the last 2 years (my GCSE years), I have returned to do my A Level studies to find, not really as a surprise, that we’ve switched back to Windows. So much for the ‘potential cost-savings’.
The problems wasn’t really with system, which could have been a great move, but the fact that the school did a direct change, without training the students or *teachers*. Basically we had Windows, then the summer holidays, then Linux. That was it. Get on with your work. Stop asking silly questions.
So we’re left to do coursework on computers that would freeze up every 5/10 minutes, if you could get them to boot at all. And they had a strange habit of booting as Windows 95. Not something you expect from a Linux machine.
Inevitably, the overworked head of IT - and only teacher that had a clue - left before the end of this year. So did the technician (that’s right, there was only one). And I think Mr. Osborne died. So that’s left us with a half Linux half Windows wreck of an IT system. And shit grades.
Yeah.
Joseph.
I was skeptical about the previous posters comments. Claims of being a student and that the schools grades where bad.
This is what I discovered.
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/cgi-bin/performancetables/dfe1x1_05.pl?School=9354038
Make up you own mind