BBC suspends Jam, its flagship online learning web site

Amended 15/3/2007; update (below) 17/3/2007. Correction and amendments to 17/3/2007 update, made on 7/4/2007, in response to a request from Lewis Bronze, CEO of Espresso Education Ltd.

Donald Clark and the Guardian Online note the BBC's decision to suspend Jam, its expensive, ambitious, error-ridden and strangely designed e-learning web site. From the beginning it smacked to me of adults imagining what children like, and seemed to have been produced with an eye on visual complexity rather than on effective on-line learning. Notwithstanding that around 170,000 people had registered to use it.

"The BBC Trust has today decided to suspend the online education service, BBC Jam, with effect from 20 March 2007. The Trust has requested BBC management to prepare fresh proposals for how the BBC should deliver the Charter obligation to promote formal education and learning, meeting the online needs of school age children. Once completed, the Trust will subject BBC management's proposals to a full Public Value Test, including a market impact assessment by Ofcom."

"The Trust's decision follows extensive discussions with Government and the European Commission about how to address allegations from some in the industry that Jam is damaging their interests."

But there are 200 jobs at risk, 170,000 registered users will lose a service that (?) they've been making use of, and any work that they have saved, and a lot of procured and ready-to-launch content, developed with, say, £75m of public funding, may now never be used. 14/3/2007 BBC management press release. 14/3/2007 BBC Trust press release, from which the above excerpt is taken.

17/3/2007. There is plenty of interest (puns notwithstanding) on the Web about the BBC decision, some of it highly critical. See, for example, BBC in a fruitless jam, by John Connell, and Why does toast always land with the Jam side down?, by Ewan McIntosh.  And you may also be interested in the stance taken in 2002 by the companies that originally objected to and won stringent conditions in the January 2003 BBC/Government decision for the BBC to become a major producer of on-line learning content, funded by the public through their TV license fees. For example here is a quote - reported in The Register - from Lewis Bronze of Espresso Education Ltd from that time:

"The opportunity provided by broadband technology should allow a torrent of educational content to flow - instead, the BBC's current proposals will give us a desert. The BBC's current proposals for their free to air digital curriculum will massively curtail the choice available for schools. Using £170 million of the public's licence fees destroys a competitive market, deprives children and teachers of choice and diversity, and kills off the UK educational software industry."

Note. Other posts about BBC Jam:

• 19 March 2007 - BBC Director General Mark Thompson on Jam, in October 2006.
• 17 March 2007 - BBC Jam. We need usage data.
• 14 March 2007 - BBC suspends Jam, its flagship online learning web site.

Comments

[Donald Clark]

You had to register to see the content - so the 170,000 figure is skewed. I'm a registered user but hated the content - see also this detailed review from Graham Davies, who knows a thing or two about language learning:
http://www.camsoftpartners.co.uk/BBC_Jam.htm. [Yes, there is already a link to Graham's piece above under "error-ridden and strangely designed" above. Seb.]

This was a disaster waiting to happen.

[John Connell]

Lewis Bronze's line of argument from 2002 is, of course, laughable. After the decision to push a minimum of 50% of the content production for BBC Jam out to the private sector, the BBC decided to be very careful and retain less than 50% in-house. This means that at least £75m of the total spend on Jam became available to the private sector.

Add to that the £555m that has been allocated for eLearning Credits since this funding stream was established by DfES, and any talk of ending up with a 'desert' is simply ludicrous. The commercial suppliers have been able to bid into something like 88% of the total funding available (and that's not even looking at all the other locally managed budgets that have been used by schools over the years to fund ICT and e-learning content) - it seems that the remaining 12% has to be available to them too.

As I have said elsewhere, market distortion is very much in the eye of the beholder. I prefer to call it greed.

[Donald Clark]

Lewis Bronze got it right. As soon as the BBC announcement was made capital for product and company growth in this area dried up.

OK, it's now a sunk cost. The question now is whether it was worth it. I think not. After burning through £75 million the output has been a trickle and of poor quality. 200 people plus suppliers and they simply failed to deliver.

On the issue of registrations:

25,000 schools
450,000 teachers
9 million schoolchildren
20 million plus parents
….and that’s just England and Wales.

Suddenly 170,000 since early 2006 doesn’t seem such a lot, especially with the BBC brand as the driver.

[Peter Evans]

Not only has the BBC suspended its ‘BBC Jam’ Digital Curriculum service, but from the end of March the production of the educational TV programmes that BBC Jam was to replace will also cease and the staff associated with them will be made redundant. It was hoped they would be resettled over in the expanding BBC Jam service, but not now, so it looks as if these key staff will be lost to the BBC. More serious is that the suspension of BBC Jam and the stopping of school TV production at the same time now means that the BBC actually makes no formal education provision at all for children and schools. I know the BBC Trust has asked for ‘..fresh proposals for how the BBC meets its public purpose of promoting formal education in the context of school age children’, but by the time this is completed, many key TV production staff will have been sacked. Time to make a fuss, write to MPs, etc.

[Nick Kind]

It would have been good to judge jam by its entirety, not the tip of the iceberg that had been released. I think many in the BBC would probably have acknowledged that the material released to begin with was not the finest that was going to emerge (you can debate the merits of this tactic by the BBC separately...).

I would say this, as a senior member of the team which was producing the most external commissions for the BBC (Tinopolis and Tinopolis/Spark Learning Consortium), but the stuff we were working on would never have worked in the commercial market and was highly useable, distinctive and pioneering. Problem is, you're most likely not ever going to be able to see it or make your own judgements on it. That's the scandal right now.