While the interministerial digital department continues to develop and infuse its digital suite into the ministries, certain ministries, in a more confidential manner, are developing a range of tools to serve their agents. This is the case of the Ministry of National Education, where Apps.education, a digital services platform, passed the 400,000 user mark during the month of March, without any institutional communication since its creation.Â
“The idea was born in 2018, for availability in March 2020, at the time of confinement linked to the Covid crisis. It was then a matter of finding the software, tools to be made available to ministry agents to help them in their daily work.†, explains the ministry. Among the services deployed are a videoconferencing tool, based on BigBlueButton, a storage offer based on Nextcloud, video streaming based on PeerTube, an appointment scheduling system, a tool for shortening a URL, and also an electronic messaging service modernized, which is currently being deployed. Â
Integrate ministry issues
This platform had to be articulated with the very specific challenges of national education agents, including that of maintaining access to productions. Indeed, when an agent is transferred to another academy, his digital identity changes as does his email address. Apps.education allows, independently of possible transfers, to maintain access to all its productions throughout the agent’s career. Â
“We developed some of the tools internally, because the market offering did not correspond to the needs of agents. The free software center of the Dijon academy was one of the pillars of the project: they created the Apps portal and several other services. The front end of our videoconferencing service is also produced in-house.†At the same time, the platform evolves according to the wishes of its users: “We work with the editors behind each solution to evolve the project in the direction that interests our users. They are also invited to sessions with publishers, which give rise to fruitful discussions allowing the products to evolve in the right direction.†, we explain within the ministry.Â
The advent of free software is starting to be felt within the Ministry of National Education, despite a small portion of agents, particularly in central administration, still having Microsoft tools. “Free software corresponds to the values of Education: the possibility of using, modifying, maintaining control, this is a real issue for many reasons†, details the ministry.
Starting with the confidentiality of the data used, such as student grades. To continue in this vein, the ministry is also in discussion with the State DSI since some time to consider workstations that would run Linux. This is already the case on certain workstations in colleges, high schools or schools, where the equipment is the responsibility of the communities and not of the ministry directly.
A cost advantage
In addition, from a more pragmatic point of view, free software has a significant advantage in terms of cost. “In a ministry with 1.2 million agents, we cannot afford a licensing system per agent, per year, like Teams, which would be out of budget. By deploying free software, even counting the contribution to the community, the expense is immeasurable†, explain the ministry.Â
If the ministry has not carried out any communication on Apps.education to date, it is also a question of scale: despite its 400,000 current users, a majority of whom arrived thanks to word of mouth, the platform remains dependent on several constraints: the increase in prices in IT, at the moment, is one of them. Thus, if scaling up to 1.2 million agents remains an objective, discussions concerning this step up are underway to guarantee the capabilities of the platform.
