Education tech supplier RM smacked by UK schools closure As the UK's parents prepare to take kids to school for the last time tomorrow, education tech supplier RM told the London Stock Exchange it anticipates a "material impact on trading". UK prime minister Boris Johnson yesterday declared schools and colleges across England would shut down after pickup on Friday afternoon – the …
The concept of RM is sound: a series of machines that are consistently built, tested and configured, allowing them to be scaled up in number and supported by a team who don't need to worry about a million Frankensteined configuration and specifications when troubleshooting. Meaning that faulty devices can be swiftly swapped out with minimal fuss or time-loss. This enables IT support staff on site to become familiar with them and even move between schools without needing to learn a completely different IT ecosystem each time they move. Leading to lower capex and opex costs and lower overheads for the education system.
The reality, on the other hand...There must be an XKCD for this.
>The concept of RM is sound: a series of machines that are consistently built, tested and configured, allowing them to be scaled up in number and supported by a team who don't need to worry about a million Frankensteined configuration and specifications when troubleshooting.
It has been a little surprising that RM didn't grasp the post-2012 education environment with both hands and promote the usage of systems based on Rasberry Pi's and so support and enhance its UK-based ecosystem.
Funnily enough there are times when the nerdiest techy solution isn't the best. This is one of them.
PI's only satisfy an edge case in schools.
For most kids all they will need is a Windows PC - harsh but true. Keep a couple of PI's in the corner for the kind of use cases a BBC Model B was used for in our days - Programming and controlling robots etc...
"It has been a little surprising that RM didn't grasp the post-2012 education environment with both hands and promote the usage of systems based on Rasberry Pi's and so support and enhance its UK-based ecosystem."
Apart from Gordon 10's obvious point, the RasPi was a new and immature product back then. No one knew how it might or even if it would take off, let alone whether production would or could ramp up to full commercial levels.
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They stopped making gear years ago.
Their software is mainly just software-as-a-service type nowadays, all web-based.
As a mathematician, computer scientist and school IT manager let me just say:
IT: Good riddance, generally speaking.
Mathematician: RM Maths was actually educationally very good.
IT: RM Maths sucks (install, maintain, users, expense, etc. etc. etc.)
Let me enlighten you:
A VLE is an intranet with a content management system so the school can put files on there, assign them to kids, the kids can login from home, view the files, submit answers or new documents, etc.
That's not the kind of thing you slap in at the last moment if you don't already have one (instead, you jump on something like Google Classroom, which is free to all schools), it's not the kind of thing you just run setup.exe and it works (server provision, port forwarding, security, LDAP integration, etc.), and it's not the kind of thing you want to sign up for a year for just because you didn't have one and think you need one to cover corona.
I guess this means that the abysmally named 'RMeasimaths' product (What's that? R Me Asmiths? - no? Ah! 'RM Easi[sic] Maths') is likely to be left requiring Adobe Flash for now then :-(
To be fair, the actual software looks okay and my daughter enjoys practising her maths on it, and there's some kind of progress dashboard which the teachers apparently love..
But when the likes of Matific works instantly on a modern browser on any device without having to download the soon-to-be-truly-dead Flash player and jump through hoops to enable it; and looks even better. What hope do they really have?
Even worse than the Flash dependency is the login page which doesn't offer any kind of persistent login but also has three required inputs: username, school name and password which breaks Chrome's password manager.
Meaning that I basically have to help my 6 year old daughter to log in every frickin' time she wants to use it!
Once logged in I get told I don't have flash player installed. Actually, yes I do - and the site is whitelisted! But click on the "download flash" link and as if my magic it suddenly decides that I do have flash and starts the game. What a mess!
Allegedly RM are working on a (presumably HTML5) version but I can see that getting canned if they're heading into trouble
I don't wish job insecurity/redundancy on anyone , especially during these crazy times, but I really don't think anyone would particularly miss RM if it went under.
Just to clarify - education is a devolved issue. The Scottish government is still equivocating about what to do and how to do it. No official notification about closures has been sent out - at least by our council - leading to a large number of disgruntled and uncertain parents and schools.
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