On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 08:29 +1000, Alex Fisher wrote: > The Register had this interesting article this morning. Appears an entire > high > school class failed an IT exam because the submitted the exam in MS Word > format, but the examining board doesn't accept Word documents.... > > <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/08/cotelands_word/> > > see also <http://dida.edexcel.org.uk/home/spb/toolkit/>. > > Interestingly, ODF is not listed either. Perhaps Ian can open talks with them > (if he hasn't already :) ).
Dida has been rather notorious for this type of thing happening. It is rather ironic that as an exam board specialising in open systems we do accept popular proprietary formats for the simple fact that causing this degree of customer angst is suicide commercially. We have the advantage of being small and flexible. We can educate without being dictatorial. We also provide assessment on demand to suit the client so it is rather different to the way Edexcel does it. Edexcel, perhaps feel that they are so powerful that they don't need to take such things into account but probably it's a consequence of being a large bureaucracy with rules that the moderators have no discretion over. I know for a fact that there has been massive migration to OCR nationals from Dida. OCR and Edexcel have a massive majority share of the market for IT school exams in England for age 16. It is one reason why we target younger children. Using the principle of disruptive innovation, there are more potential customers in the younger age groups and the trick is to get the price point down to where they can participate. There is no effective competition here and if we get them younger and earlier (including the .doc users :-) ) there is a good chance they will stay with us as our brand becomes stronger and they qualify earlier. So far things are going to plan, it just takes time and patience. One thing that does arise is the number of e-portfolios that start with one Drupal page with a load of MS Office files attached! The desktop paradigm is very firmly entrenched not least in teachers. Rather than simply failing the students we would rather inform them and their assessors of the issue and give them an opportunity to put it right. We are primarily interested in learning and getting them to demonstrate that learning. We only provide exemplars using Open systems but we acknowledge some schools have massive investment in proprietary systems so p***ing them off by being inflexible is not how to win friends and influence people :-) In practical terms, .doc and .xls are trivially easy to deal with in OOo, a bigger problem would be eg .pub or proprietary vector drawing formats. -- Ian Ofqual Accredited IT Qualifications A new approach to assessment for learning www.theINGOTs.org - 01827 305940 You have received this email from the following company: The Learning Machine Limited, Reg Office, 36 Ashby Road, Tamworth, Staffordshire, B79 8AQ. Reg No: 05560797, Registered in England and Wales. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@marketing.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@marketing.openoffice.org
