BBC culls Jam staff
Suspended education portal expels 200
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The BBC will cut all staff posts at its suspended online education portal, BBC Jam. Around 200 job slots will disappear.
The free-at-point-of-use service, which had an annual budget of £150m, was suspended in March after unidentified private education providers complained to the EU that the Beeb was damaging their market.
At the time, acting BBC chairman Chitra Bharucha said there would be "fresh proposals for how the BBC meets its public purpose of promoting formal education in the context of school age children".
Meanwhile, layoffs resulting from the Jam decision have seemingly been minimised.
Controller of learning Liz Cleaver said: "I recognise that the past few weeks have been stressful for everyone involved. We have tried as hard as possible to minimise the number of post closures when making changes to staff numbers and, in particular, to avoid compulsory redundancy by seeking volunteers or redeploying staff."
The Beeb reckons the net loss of jobs will actually be just 31, with many personnel redeployed and others leaving of their own volition. Discussions with staff and unions continue.
The corporation is still required by its charter to promote education and learning, and licence-fee payers aren't being offered their £150m back.
It now appears that whatever the fresh proposals may be, they won't involve the original Jam structure. However, according to BBC News, a new learning plan "will be submitted to the [BBC] Trust in the next few months".
Parents and perhaps teachers may be hoping the Beeb can manage to get back online. At the moment the position could appear to users as though fee-paying schools had managed to have state education shut down - without any corresponding reduction in the tax burden.
On the other side, a lot of companies offer paid online education services and would argue that it's totally unfair for the Beeb to wade into their market with free offerings. Others in the sector would have hoped for work as Jam contractors - a big chunk of Jam budget was earmarked for sourcing from industry. Outfits like Tutorvista and Research Machines will be watching the Beeb's progress closely. ®
COMMENTS
There was another way
I think Jam really missed an opportunity to provide a set of content and applications that the industry can't because it's uneconomic - the more creative and inspiring stuff that doesn't fit the national curriculum, or just maybe in other languages - Welsh has been mentioned.
'The industry' has to be focussed on quite a narrow area of development because of the box-ticking ethos - the BBC could have developed the same approach it has to say, comedy and drama and gone really experimental and interesting <sigh>
So sell it!
Why don't the BBC spin it out as a company then?
If JAM is so good, then it will compete in an open market. The taxpayers (or whoever) can get their money back via a bond structure (or similar), and so on and so forth.... I feel a more creative and EU compliant solution is possible....
BESA and friends
"educational software industry also benefits from government money via the E-Learning Credit"
This is true in general terms, but when you look at how credits are spent - the bigger ed publishers of old are seeing very little of this funding - they hate elearning credits in fact. UK curricula change rapidly - almost annually, the larger publishers are unresponsive and still expect to milk their lines fully before dropping or updating. Prior to the industry being stimulated most elearning software was truly, dreadfully awful technically and educationally.
The bulk of elearning credits go to new, smaller software houses - often run by and with teachers - they turn around software and updates fast, charge reasonable site license fees and critically provide software which meets the needs of schools and teachers.
Its a great shame Jam is gone - for welsh language speakers, for parents who want to work with their kids at home and for learners with accessibility needs - all of whom are served extremely badly by the main co's behind this action.
I don't expect RM, Pearsons et al to sell a single piece of software more as a result.
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