Some Fronter detail please

I've been asked to look at Fronter. Having scanned the posts here there doesn't seem to be too much detail.

Does it sit on Sharepoint, for example, or stand by itself?

Does it tend to be hosted off-site, or can it be hosted in house?

Is it all web based?

Can it be set up as an MLE?

Is it SCORM compliant?

I'll try and think of more questions to ask as I get into it.

Fronter stands by itself. It can be hosted in house, but from what I know it is usually hosted on their Linux servers in Norway (at the university of oslo). I know ours is.

 

It is 100% web based, and is as far as I know SCORM compliant.

 

What is the difference between a VLE and a MLE?

As I see it, a VLE is the Learning Environment, pure and simple. An MLE, Managed Learning Environment, is a single user interface where not only pupils can access the Learning section, but admin and teachers can also access their MIS etc, and parents can see details of their child's progress and examples of their work. So depending which group you belong to, as you log on you bring up a user interface appropriate to you. For myself, it has the advantage of providing a seamless user experience whichever section of the program you're in, e.g. teachers don't have to learn how to manoeuvre round two interfaces. It also provides for a single logon (I know that can be done with two separate programs). I'm all for making the user experience as simple as possible, not everyone works in IT.

^BUMP^

Our LEA (Trafford) has today announced it is going to use Fronter after a much drawn out consulation process (going on 3 years now)

 

We have been given the choice of take part or go your own way. They will fund it for the first year (allowing the government to meet their 2008 target and appease the voters) and then we have to find funding ourselve (about £1.50 per student and staff in a school of about 1000 kids) :?

 

Currently I am struggling to see how this system will integrate with SIMS (but I'm assuming it does do it hence it probably wouldnt have been chosen). So is anyone else using fronter?

Our LEA (Leicester City) is going to use Fronter in the new year. I saw a demo on it a while back and although it looks impressive I can’t see it being much use for the primary age kids at either of my two schools. As far as I’m aware, there has been no mention of the school paying anything to use Fronter but of course that could change. This is another example of money being wasted to meet government targets when in my schools it would be better spent on replacing hardware.

Our LEA (Leicester City) is going to use Fronter in the new year. I saw a demo on it a while back and although it looks impressive I can’t see it being much use for the primary age kids at either of my two schools. .

 

hi why do you say Fronter won't be much use for the primary age kids?

is it hard to use? is there a lot of reading involved? are the kids expected to do a lot of writing or use higher level ICT skills? would be interested to know whether this MLE would be any use for primary, especially younger children, and if not which MLEs are better in this respect and why

thanks

Somerset has signed it's 1 year contract with Fronter this week and will be providing it to all primary and first schools, and every second and middle school that wishes to use it.

 

The interface is quite good, although it lacks in one or 2 areas.

 

The first issue is that it can't export directly back to Assessment Manager, so isn't really as useful as it could be, but then this is more of a problem with Capita, or so I have been told.

 

The second issue is the fact that there is no option for a session time out. So if a pupil logs in, or an admin/teacher/support staff, on a public machine and forget to click logout, the next person who goes to the machine will have full access to that person's account. I was told that Fronter are not going to be adding the ability to have a timeout either - which is a very bad thing.

 

On the plus side, it is 1000% better than Learnwise, the interface is much better and easier for people to learn how to use. Tasks such as creating a quiz are easy.

 

On whether or not it will be useful for primary age kids. I agree that it's use will be very limited. I just can't see how it will aid a child's lessons.

 

And it is not an MLE, it is a VLE. To build an MLE you would need a piece of software such as Learning Gateway to access the sims information. Somerset is building a MLE using just that. Accounts will be provisioned from the SIMS database and will be used across the services of the MLE, and hopefully will only require a single sign in for each person.

Notts LA are going to be using Fronter too.

Fronter has been selected as the preferred Learning Platform provider for Surrey schools.

Fronter has been selected as the preferred Learning Platform provider for Surrey schools.

 

The question is..why?

 

The quality and capabilities of the current crop of VLEs seems to be quite lacking considering the cost they are charging for them. I have seen more sophisticated systems developed by schools themselves.

 

Fronter especially seems to lack polish and is appears to be a patched together product. It does not seem to offer any kind of integration with SIMS, no LDAP authentication, and the interface is much less intuitive than Moodle.

 

I am puzzled as to why so many places seem to be signing up to it, what are the killer functions it has? Granted, it has won some product awards, but it actually seems quite inflexible and aethestically awful. I struggle to see how it can be transformed into something appealing to younger age range kids (primary/middle).

Edited March 6, 2008 by klawd
typo

It does not seem to offer any kind of integration with SIMS, no LDAP authentication.

 

Not true..... Fronter does offer integration with SIMS, CMIS, RM Integris to name a few. It also offers LDAP authenticaiton!

The quality and capabilities of the current crop of VLEs seems to be quite lacking considering the cost they are charging for them. I have seen more sophisticated systems developed by schools themselves.

 

Because most schools simply don't have time to build systems themselves.

 

Fronter especially seems to lack polish and is appears to be a patched together product. It does not seem to offer any kind of integration with SIMS, no LDAP authentication, and the interface is much less intuitive than Moodle.

 

Well, it integrates with SIMS and Active Directory just fine, or so I've been led to believe by our LEA who will be co-ordinating a single sign on project that will integrate every school in Somerset into a central AD system by pulling the details from their SIMS.net servers.

 

And it pulls all the class details directly from SIMS too. The only thing it can't do is put data back into SIMS.

 

Now, bear in mind that this is what we have been *told*. Not what we've seen, as we haven't had it set up for us yet.

 

I am puzzled as to why so many places seem to be signing up to it, what are the killer functions it has? Granted, it has won some product awards, but it actually seems quite inflexible and aethestically awful. I struggle to see how it can be transformed into something appealing to younger age range kids (primary/middle).

 

Well, it looks better than the average Moodle install when you have a bunch of young kids like we do. It is also hugely more intuitive and aesthetically pleasing than Learnwise. And I would have said the opposite - it looks more friendly to the younger kids than the older.

I've seen it pull data from both Serco Facility CMIS and SIMS (I currently use Fronter with CIMS and am moving to SIMS soon), been told that it can integrate with AD and the LGFL (London Grid for Learning) have implemented SSO for Fronter and other LGFL services which works ok

 

You are correct in saying the data transfer between your MIS and Fronter is a one way operation - unfortunatly.

Edited March 6, 2008 by adamf
typo

FYI, from my (limited) understanding:

 

London Grid for Learning have over 400K users on Fronter. Might be an idea to have a chat with an area, wouldn't hurt.

 

J

We're in the early stages of building a VLE here in Neath Port Talbot. At the moment we're looking at a combination of Sharepoint with the Learning Kit and SIMS Web Parts and Moodle for class management.

 

Could this Fronter thing be an alternative or am I misunderstanding? They seem to be a bit shy of showing the product off on their web site (no screenshots or online demos!), which seems a little dodgy to me.

 

The thing we're finding with Sharepoint is that it is a nightmare to customise. We don't particularly want our VLE to look like a sharepoint site and we would like it to be XHTML compliant (after stripping a Sharepoint master page down to bare basics it still reports over 150 W3 errors!). Is Fronter any better in this respect?

 

Anyone got any accessible links of this product running?

You can pretty much forget about customising frontier in any useful way.

 

I spoke to Fronter about implementing our own code modules, and Fronter will not support custom versions, I must admit, I expected this since it is hosted remotely, a big problem imo.

 

From the demonstrations I have seen, Fronter only "links" to SIMS in a very tenuous way, since it is hosted remotely and has no direct access to the SQL server, it cannot store information back into SIMS.

 

As stated, it is not an MLE. I am not convinced it ever will be, either. When we questioned this, we were told it was Capita who were dragging their heels, but there was no timescale of when the integration would be implemented.

 

My gut feeling is after two years (what the local county contract here lasts for..) it will likely be phased out in favour of moving towards SIMS Learning Gateway, which will have the proper SIMS links, and with some tweaking could probably do most of what Fronter does.

 

If you email the fronter people you can get a login to their demo site, but if you are used to using sharepoint, I think you are going to be very underwhelmed, it is a very unpolished product.

Edited March 30, 2008 by klawd

As stated, it is not an MLE. I am not convinced it ever will be, either. When we questioned this, we were told it was Capita who were dragging their heels, but there was no timescale of when the integration would be implemented.

 

My gut feeling is after two years (what the local county contract here lasts for..) it will likely be phased out in favour of moving towards SIMS Learning Gateway, which will have the proper SIMS links, and with some tweaking could probably do most of what Fronter does.

 

Just a quick point here - I've not seen a VLE with full integration between itself and SIMS.net yet, due to problems writing back to SIMS (which is not allowed in most cases). Fronter is no different here.

 

Also, SIMS Learning Gateway is *not* an MLE. It does not have any of the VLE functionality that fronter has. It is purely a web front end for SIMS.net. Sure, you could find a web-part based VLE to integrate into Sharepoint, but so far I've not seen any decent progress on this. For example, the Learnwise solution by Granada was useless. It promised integration with Learning Gateway, but what this meant was you could click a link which would log you in to the seperate system. And as this is Capita's partner for VLE's, this isn't exactly hopeful.

 

If you combine SIMS Learning Gateway with Fronter, you almost have a full MLE. And once full write-back is available in Fronter, and single sign on is implemented across your particular LEA, you will have the full MLE.

I managed to get a demo login, and you're correct, I was disappointed. There just didn't seem to be a lot to the system and the design and layout was awful. Its no wonder they don't post any screenshots or online demos on their site.

 

We have a demo in April of the new SIMS Learning Gateway and web parts and have seen their new online demo inside a sharepoint system. Dare I say it, it actually looks pretty good! I'll believe it when we have it installed on our own system though