Alpha Learning has complained about the procurement process for the BECTA eLearning platform to the European Commission Competition Commission. Unlike other complaints I’ve written about previously, this appears to be from a proprietary rather than open source vendor.
The gist of the complaint appears to be that BECTA treated some “mandatory” interoperability requirements as optional but other “mandatory” requirements as compulsory. The interoperability requirements in this case relate to the SCORM open standard. Open standards such as SCORM are, of course, central to fostering a genuinely open market in eLearning area, both for the software platforms and the educational content they contain. Without open standards, open source and open content are likely to be restricted in this area by vendor lock-in.
We can expect to see more eLearning news during the BETT Show, which starts tomorrow.
The BECTA annoucement of the winners of the tendering is at: http://news.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=27053