Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (37 mails)

[Michael Eicks <meicks@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for this information. Accrediting is really an important point.
Certification will be another one. Currently we have (as far as I know)
three schools in Singapore that started in february 07 with the first
book. At the moment I need more schools to get more feedback about the
content.

I'm just the author of the books and I want to push them because:
- Linux is great.
- Education is a very important market.
- The books are good.
- I like the project very much, because it is my baby.

I'm not a salesman and not a marketing guy. My problems are:
- I'm responsible for a lot of other (non-academic) training materials.
- Most of my colleagues focus on developing/selling trainings, they
  can earn (more) money with.
- I don't come from the academic market and so I have just a few
  contacts
  to academics.
- I don't have any budgets.

At the moment it is something like a one man show. It's my show. And if
there will come another high-priority training next week, I have to
interrupt the show. That's the sadly truth.

In January 08 I will finish the third book. I don't know what will be
after. I need some "success stories", requests and kit sales till the
end of next year. I've some other ideas for academic trainings based on
Linux, I don't know whether there will be a chance to realize (some of)
them.

Michael

On Fri, Jun 01, Ian Lynch wrote:

> You might also be interested in accrediting such work. Certainly in the
> UK you have very little chance of mass take up of work not related to
> the Statutory Curriculum and providing official accreditation makes take
> up much more likely as well as providing a revenue stream. Take a look
> at www.openquals.org.uk and put TLM in the search. We are TLM (The
> Learning Machine) a UK government accredited Awarding Body with
> qualifications accredited for use in schools that have been designed to
> be compatible with the National Curriculum in the UK but also to be
> flexible enough for international use. We have a project to develop in
> South Africa in partnership with the Shuttleworth Foundation and
> partners in Germany, Portugal, Romania, Poland, Turkey, USA, Australia
> and New Zealand. We have endorsement from the UK sector skills council
> for IT and telecommunications and we plan to get further endorsement by
> governments in other countries starting with South Africa.
> 
> So far we have certificates that cover each level in the UK national
> qualifications framework from special needs education to Level 2 (Top
> half of the age 16 attainment range) and we plan to support Level 3 as a
> natural progression to university entrance level. Our certification is
> wider than just GNU-Linux. It covers issues related to intellectual
> property, ISO standards and social networking and is designed to take
> students and their teachers from where they are now (Mostly using
> Windows) to where we want them to be (able to make informed decisions
> about the technologies they use). So we don't insist on them changing
> their technology at the outset, we educate them to make that change when
> it is sensible for them to do so. We plan to use revenue from the
> certification to commission web based learning applications that conform
> to open standards and are freely available to schools. One the
> curriculum is systematically supported by free internet based resources
> there is no reason not to use free software infrastructure especially
> when the users are educated about why. It will take some time to get to
> this point since we have to grow at the rate revenues from the project
> support investment but we have done probably the most difficult part
> which is setting up a government approved awarding body from scratch,
> getting the certificates approved and getting sufficient schools
> participating to finance the development of the web site. Growth should
> be easy now ;-)
> 
> Ian

-- 
Michael Eicks, Linux Curriculum Developer
Novell Global Training Services
Novell GmbH, Alt Moabit 91c, 10559 Berlin, Germany
Tel: +49-40-890646-44, E-Mail: michael.eicks@xxxxxxxxxx
Novell GmbH, GF: Volker Smid, Djamel Souici, HRB 21108 (AG Duesseldorf)