Europe

• At the Public Spaces conference in the Netherlands on June 6th, Alexis Kauffmann from the French Ministry of Education and co-founder of the non-profit software platform FraMaSoft, discussed France’s move towards a comprehensive open source-based education strategy, 2023-2027. The aim is to achieve digital sovereignty and reduce dependence on big tech companies like Microsoft and Google, which are widely used in education systems in other countries.
• “One of the key actions is to offer authoring tools to our teacher and tools based on open source software. No Google Classrooms. Not Microsoft Teams. We have chosen Moodle Elea as a learning management system,” explained Alexis Kauffmann who also pointed to other tools to learn to code and mathematics like Jupyter.
• France uses an app platform with open-source tools like Nextcloud, Big Blue Botton, and Collaboration. They even have their own ‘github’ (owned by Microsoft) called La Forge, where teachers share code.
• “To support this, we have public funds for digital commons, we organise workshops and finance the software, and therefore we can do without Microsoft and Google,” Alexis Kauffmann explained.

“I am not saying it is easy. The biggest obstacle is political courage to resist the lobbyists both at a national and European level,” he said and pointed to other risks like the quality of big tech’s products, being isolated in Europa, and artificial intelligence.

He hopes other European countries will follow suit and quoted The European Council Recommendation on education: