So now we’ve got several billion compromised email addresses, passwords and god knows what bits of personal data floating around the internet. Everyone from Adobe to Yahoo seems to have had a leak somewhere; and that’s just the stuff that wasn’t supposed to be out there in the first place. Now add Facebook and all the other creepy social media vacuuming up your data, and it’s enough to make you want to pull the plug on the net altogether.
For those of us using online tools in education, the writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer: we’ve got to take control of the sites we use with our students and stop being complacent (or just plain lazy, incompetent, whatever). There is no free lunch, and it isn’t exactly rocket science setting up the basics a school would need to function in all online aspects. And here’s the ultimate quick guide on what you’d need:
- A LAMP setup – either self hosted, or hosted somewhere with good infrastructure and data protection laws (in Asia that means Singapore perhaps and not much else, unfortunately)
- An LMS – go for open source which kind of narrows it to Moodle, really (no, Canvas is NOT truly open source…)
- A cloud server – Nextcloud (see above)
- An email server
- A survey system if you need it (I do) – Limesurvey is fully open source
- And that’s about it!