There was nothing except the cost. And it was no small expense: the Ministry of Education spent twelve million euros on the digital platform ‘Portal Digitale Schule (PoDS)’. It was closed after three years. But that’s not all: setting up the follow-up project will take another three years and entail new costs.
There is varying criticism of the “Digital School Portal”. Like many other projects during the Corona period, construction was freely awarded. The company that was also responsible for the bankruptcy project “Kaufhaus Österreich” of former Minister of Economic Affairs Margarete Schramböck (ÖVP) came into the picture.
The responsible department head Martin Netzer justifies this by saying that only Accenture GmbH could implement such a complex project so quickly. The platform was used by approximately 380,000 students and 32,000 teachers over three years. With a total of 1.2 million students and 125,000 teachers, this is not a significant size. An acceptance analysis commissioned by the department is kept secret.
The department is now building a new platform. This will not only entail additional costs, but will also take another three years. But it must also be able to do something about it: there must be an electronic class register in which messages to parents, electronic certificates and much more can be stored.
In the “Digital School Portal” only learning content was available and only sparsely. As Michael Maurer of the learning app “esquirrel” from “Krone” reports, external school partners were called upon to link their content to the platform. But that was simply not possible. “We kept getting error messages and at a certain point we left it alone.” Maurer took this opportunity to criticize the fact that there is a budget of 130 million euros for textbooks, but only two million for digital learning content.
“The PoDS is and was a disaster in terms of data protection,” testifies the IT administrator of a school in Upper Austria, who wishes to remain anonymous. The portal was hosted on a Microsoft server – not in Austria, but in the Netherlands. The successor will be hosted at the Federal Computing Center. This failed project shows that things that come from ‘above’ are ‘rarely widely accepted and often no one needs them’.
Source: Krone
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
