The industry association Bitkom is in favor of a national education platform and criticizes the persistent problems in Germany with regard to digital distance learning. The fragmented digital educational offer is not expedient, explains Bitkom in a press release. Meanwhile, the learning platform Schul-Cloud of the Hasso Plattner Institute has seen a sharp increase in access numbers.

Bitkom President Berg criticizes that one year after the start Since the coronavirus pandemic, comprehensive digital lessons are still not possible: “One of the main problems are the platforms in the federal states, which are often unable to cope with the large number of users and collapse under the strain”. Since the start of school there have been problems with the accessibility of the educational platforms of the federal states and competing offers from private companies.

Integration of existing solutions In the press release, Bitkom also refers to the results of the education summit in September last year. The education ministers of the federal states drew up seven declarations of intent at the meeting, one of which formulated the step-by-step development of an educational platform by the federal government.

According to Achim Berg, the wheel does not have to be reinvented for this: “Good solutions that have already proven themselves need not be discarded, but can be incorporated into the development of a national educational platform. The digitization of schools must not fail because of the federal small and small, but requires a joint effort by municipalities, states and the federal government. ”

HPI’s school cloud relies on open source Software Meanwhile, the learning platform of the Hasso Plattner Institute is reporting user records. Since March 2020 the number of users of the HPI learning platform has increased almost thirty-fold, the institute announced on Friday.

In the meantime, almost 3400 schools used the platform. This number has increased tenfold since March. According to the HPI, at peak times up to 35 000 users can only use the integrated video conference system BigBlueButton. The open source and free HPI cloud is particularly widespread in Lower Saxony, Brandenburg and Thuringia.

Side by side of digital educational offers The HPI project primarily competes with solutions based on the open source platform Moodle. This includes the Bavarian learning platform Mebis, which, however, repeatedly struggles with technical problems. There are also a number of medium-sized solutions on the market. These include IServ, ucs @ school, Webweaver, itslearning or the Schul.Cloud from the Hanover-based provider Heinekingmedia, which speak out against a state-sponsored platform. In addition to medium-sized companies, large US corporations such as Microsoft, Google and Apple are also trying to gain a foothold in the education market.

The HPI School Cloud was 2017 started as a pilot project and financially supported by the Federal Ministry of Education as a non-profit open source project. In response to the corona pandemic, the ministry decided in March 2020 to open the HPI school cloud across Germany for all schools that could not use a comparable solution of the state or the school authority.

(ndi)