In an effort to help free and democratic schools with digitising their management workflows and social pedagogic endeavours, the AlekSIS project has partnered with Freie Schule Mittelweser. The school, which is run by a non-profit organisation, is the second pilot school of this kind, along with Freie Schule Schöneberg in Berlin.

Free and democratic schools tend to have special requirements for various reasons. Firstly, they often implement far more flexible lessons, with students sharing courses with peers from other grades and learning on self-determined topics and at self-regulated speed. Management platforms and pedagogic and didactic tools are often not tailored to that, as small, independent, NGO-run schools do not make for a huge part of their customer base. Hence, solutions offered by school boards and district or state governments, if available to independent schools at all, do not cover the requirements of these schools.

NLnet, through the NGI Zero fund, fosters our team’s work on improving AlekSIS for independent schools. Lead by the slogan “free software for free schools”, together with our supporting association Teckids, which shares a lot of ideals with free and democratic schools, we are now focusing on digitising flexible and open learning settings.

Together with our pilot school in Schöneberg, we have already worked out specifics of timetable and work time planning for their team and students. While teachers in public schools are normally working full-time and are mostly state-employed, tutors in independent schools tend to work part-time or partially voluntarily. Hence, availability of staff needs to be readily available as basis information when creating learning offers and timetables. AlekSIS’ calendaring system is continuously improving in this regard, and we are iterating changes with the school’s team in order to learn how they work and how AlekSIS helps them (or sometimes not … which is why we have pilot schools to learn from ;)).

In Steyerberg, we now are in the lucky position to find essentially no coordinated digitisation. Starting from minimalistic spreadsheets, the very committed team has many ways forward, and we have by now established AlekSIS for core data mangement of students and staff. From here, we will be working towards supporting the pedagogic concepts of the school, and over the past months have discussed about:

• pedagogic and legal requirements for tracking attendance and presence of students
• possible technical ideas for self check-in to courses
• availability of other tools, and requirements for communication channels

Essentially, FSMW is planning to use AlekSIS to allow easier tracking of student presence, so they can both fulfill legal requirements and reduce the load on their team, while allowing students to freely choose between learning offers. While in most public schools, students are directed by their timetable to join specific courses that are either pre-determined or chosen at the start of a term, FSMW and other independent schools want to make learning offers that students can freely choose from, ideally on a daily basis. Keeping track of which children are where, and whether they are on a good track to get a reasonable and the required share education in each subject, is a hard task that can be greatly improved with digital tools closely tailored to the workflow.

With the school’s team being dedicated to sovereign and open digital platforms, we are looking forward to not only establish AlekSIS, but also take on a new challenge where we can show the strength of Open Source software in general.