Digital transition in Education and Greece 2.0
In recent months, projects with a total budget of several million euros have been announced at a rapid pace within the context of the Recovery and Resilience Fund. An important pillar of these projects is the digital transformation, for which a total of up to 5 billion euros will be invested based on the initial allocation. The aid provided by the admittedly generous financing of Greece 2.0 for the recovery of the Greek economy, but also for the improvement of the life of the Greek citizen, is numerous.
The purpose of the Fund is not only recovery, but also resilience, which means that the money that will be invested from the Fund’s budget, but also from the resources that are mobilized should not only aim at temporary economic growth in order to recover . the ground lost due to COVID-19, but also in strengthening society and the economy, so that Europe is more resilient to future crises, but also more capable of leading the way in the era of green and digital transition.
The COVID-19 crisis brought to the surface many truths that were deliberately hidden for decades, such as the importance of public hospitals and the need to support the National Health System. It also highlighted the chronic weaknesses of the state, but also the communities in the public space who, with admirable adaptability and vigilance, coped with the difficult task of operating remotely using digital technologies.
In the field of education, for the first time, all teachers were called to operate remotely and leverage asynchronous education and digital classroom platforms such as e-class, e-me, LAMS which for years have been developed and maintained with the financial funding of the Diophantus Institute of Computer Technology and Publications (ITYE) and the bodies of the Panhellenic School Network (PSN), which are staffed by university working groups her. country.
Although the leadership of the Ministry of Education handled me very bad way of modern distance education by enforcing the use of a single platform, Webex, without any concern for the protection of the public interest and personal data, the majority of teachers actively participated in the effort of distance education, even without having the necessary digital means and with outdated digital infrastructures in the school units. The Helper in this effort was ITYE Diophantos and the employees of the PSD bodies who worked intensively and overtime to support the teachers in their very difficult task.
On the one hand, the services of ITYE Diophantos, such as the e-class of the PSD and the e-me of the digital school, which have been used for years by some teachers for modern education, were utilized by the entire educational community and enabled students to maintain communication with their teachers.
On the other hand, the working groups of ITYE Diophantos and PSD did with the meager funding what they could to upgrade the services for the benefit of the educational community. Everyone now realizes that the human resources of public bodies have know-how, as well as that further strengthening of these bodies both with human resources and with more robust digital infrastructures, e.g. data centers to support cloud computing services (cloud), faster network infrastructures, etc.
In the field of Higher Education, the transition to distance learning took place immediately and without particular problems. The accumulated know-how of the universities and their individual techniques thanks to a distance operation, but also the greater familiarity of the teaching staff with platforms such as e-class and moodle, the continuous support of the universities by the National Technology Infrastructure Network contributed to this. and Research (EDYTE) and the “Academic Internet” GUNET. GUNET has developed a wealth of digital services with open technologies and self-financing by leveraging the know-how of IT and Electrical Engineering Departments that exist in universities and the support counterparts of network management centers.
The undoubted contribution of the above bodies such as ITYE Diophantos, PSD, GUNET, EDYTE to the continuous upgrading and support of critical digital infrastructures and services was not recognized by the government and the Ministry of Education. On August 5, 2022, the Institute for Educational Policy (IEP) announced Open International Electronic Tender, Following a relevant commission from the Ministry of Education entitled “Transformation of conventional Study Programs and educational content into open source”.
The project is part of the “Digital transformation and digitization of education” action, created within the framework of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan Greece 2.0 funded by the European Union. Its total value is estimated at €51,964,405 (including VAT). At the same time, the Ministry of Education announced an international tender, financed again by the Recovery Fund, amounting to approximately 13 million euros, which concerned the creation of an integrated digital information system for primary and secondary education, the notorious “eSchools”.
In both competitions the conditions of participation regarding the economic and financial industry, but also the technical and professional ability were suchso that ITYE Diophantos cannot participate on its own, but only as a member of an association of bodies.
In this way, all the information systems that have been developed for years, evolve based on the principles of open software, and ITUE Diophantos and PSD are maintained with a very small budget, they pass into the hands of large private companies, once and only such met the inconceivable turnover figures mentioned in the terms of participation in the competition. Already for the eSchools competition, the consortium of Wind companies with Profile Software was awarded for 12.9 million euros.
While there are already information systems that largely cover the needs of education, the Ministry of Education with the approval of the Ministry of Digital Governance chooses to waste significant resources on the production of identical systems. Schematically, it is as if the state next to the Rio-Antirio bridge decides to invest money in the construction of a new bridge of the same type, for which it will additionally pay a very large amount for maintenance, which until now was done at minimal cost by the “internal” work of public bodies. The two competitions justifiably provoked the reaction of his employees ITYE Diophantus and questions from his deputies SYRIZA in Parliament.
After a few days another tender was announced for the project “Electronic University: Digital Services for Academic Institutions”. And in this case, the materially competent community of innovation and open technologies, GUNET this time, not only was not asked, but was excluded since the terms of participation photographed specific private companies.
A glaring example is that “prospective contractors [πρέπει] to have electronic services in Higher Education Institutions of Greece or abroad, which provide electronic services services in total for at least 250,000 registered students”. It is important here to highlight the background of the case.
GUNET, as an innovative and collaborative community born from the bowels of universities, decided by self-funding in recent years to develop a comprehensive e-secretariat information system solution that would solve many of the problems created by the expensive systems they have developed private companies and which rely on outdated closed solutions.
The venture university 3 which started with the initiative of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and of the Democritus University of Thrace is based on the principles of open software and at minimal cost has been installed in several of the university institutions, being a success story in the field of open software communities in our country.
This project, instead of being slowed down by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Digital Government as a good practice, is put directly by the Declaration of a pharaonic project of private companies, which will waste precious public money and bind university institutions for many years. closed solutions of dubious quality with very expensive maintenance costs.
The letter of the Hellenic Open Software Organization to the Ministry of Education is typical, highlighting how problematic the competition in question is4. In the end, as is widely discussed in our community, this money will end up in information systems, which many universities in the country are never going to use, while already AUTH, DFTH and GUNET have appealed against its terms of participation. said competition in Justice.
In contrast to the attempted “investment” of the resources of the Recovery and Resilience Fund which will channel more than 70 million euros into identical systems and in the case of closed solutions, with the same amount, the Ministry of Education he could add his computing infrastructures that showed their poverty during the pandemic period and to coordinate with the country’s well-known open software communities that operate in the agencies ITYE, ELLAK, GUNET, EDYTE so that with very little money you can develop existing services in the logic of native cloud solutions based on open source.
Such an approach would lay the groundwork for a success story in leveraging the Fund’s resources for the digital transition in education and follow in society information systems that can guarantee both recovery and resilience.
Antonis Bogris is a professor at the University of Western Attica
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