🇬🇧 🇳🇱 🇫🇷

BeLibre

Digital Autonomy

BeLibre

Five years of Digisprong: how the Flemish government quietly built an open digital learning infrastructure and is now shifting into a higher gear

🖊️ Jurgen Gaeremyn
FOSS Sovereignty Education Flanders Moodle open-source Digisprong Belgium

For the past five years, the Flemish government has been quietly building an open digital learning infrastructure for its two million people in education: on open source, on European servers, with public money. This article tells the story of how it grew, why it matters, and what the new Digisprong procurement adds to it.

It was the summer of 2014. In schools across Flanders, teachers sat behind their computers, armed with export buttons and download files, trying to salvage what they could. EloV, the electronic learning environment that the VVKSO had been offering to more than 140 Catholic secondary schools since 2005, was taken offline on 1 September for good. The Blackboard licence had become too expensive. The collaboration with KU Leuven was over. That was that.

Whatever teachers could recover, they took: documents, files, parts of course structures. But the interactive elements (the tests, the adaptive learning paths, the multimedia assignments that had taken years to build) were platform-specific. They didn’t transfer. A teacher who had painstakingly set up his Blackboard course turned away from his screen and started over.

Koen Roggemans, active in the Dutch Moodle community, wrote a forum post about it that spring. The title was bone-dry: “Glad I use Moodle.” His point was simple: Blackboard at least still offered a rudimentary export function. Anyone who wanted to take their course materials along could at least retrieve the basics. Not every platform offered even that.

Over two million reasons to do things differently

In December 2020, the Flemish Government approved a policy note with a title that left little to the imagination: “Digisprong: from backlog to frontrunner.” The trigger was the pandemic, but the shortcomings it exposed were older than that. Insufficient infrastructure, unequal access, teachers lacking support, schools without policy.

Flemish education counts well over two million people: from toddlers to university students, from adult learners to teachers and support staff. For all those people, the Flemish Government invested 375 million euros in 2020 through the Flemish Resilience recovery plan. But more important than the amount was the architecture behind it. Digisprong was not a one-off laptop purchase. The policy note described four structural pillars: solid ICT infrastructure for all schools, a thoughtful ICT school policy, ICT-competent teachers, and the establishment of a Kenniscentrum Digisprong as a permanent support structure.

That knowledge centre became the operational core. It has since been helping school leaders, teachers and ICT coordinators in all Flemish schools, across educational networks, with the use of educational technology. Not by imposing tools, but by making knowledge, instruments and guidance available.

In May 2025, the Flemish Government approved the Digiplan 2025-2029 policy note as its direct successor. A few details shifted, but the investment continued on a track that was clearly working: another 325 million euros for the next term of government.

But where does all that money actually go? The answer is more surprising than you might expect.

Not to Redmond. Not to Mountain View.

The Flemish government could have taken the easy route: A framework contract with a large cloud provider, a standardised package for all schools, problem solved. Fast, recognisable, politically safe.

It didn’t.

Instead, Digisprong built an open source infrastructure managed by the government itself, on European servers, with tools whose source code is freely available to anyone. No single company holds the keys. The government does.

The learning platform on which Digisprong offers its courses is called e-leren.be, a product of the Department of Education and Training itself. It runs on Moodle, the same open source learning environment about which Koen Roggemans wrote so relievedly in 2014, and which is now the most widely used in the world. Digisprong also manages its own Moodle environment and facilitates a Moodle learning network for teachers who use it themselves.

Alongside Moodle, Digisprong uses H5P, an independent international open source project that allows teachers to build interactive content: videos with embedded questions, fill-in exercises, digital flashcards. H5P integrates seamlessly with Moodle and is used worldwide. Digisprong hosts its own H5P environment so teachers can use it without their own server. H5P exists partly thanks to financial contributions from NDLA, the Norwegian national platform for digital learning materials: a fine example of how governments can collaborate internationally around open educational technology.

And then there is Xerte, an open source tool for building complete learning modules, with particular attention to digital accessibility. In June 2025, Digisprong hosted the Xerte Mini Conference at the Hendrik Conscience Building in Brussels, together with the Flemish and Dutch Xerte community. The sessions were recorded and are available on Digisprong’s own video channel, which also runs on open source: on PeerTube, not YouTube.

Moodle, H5P, Xerte, Digisnap, PeerTube. The entire toolstack is open source, hosted and maintained by Digisprong itself. And anyone who lived through the eloV summer of 2014 understands exactly why.

Why this matters

Let’s look back for a moment at the teacher from 2014 on that ill-fated summer evening.

He wasn’t losing sleep over the software. He was losing sleep over his lost course materials. His school had become so intertwined with one platform over the years that no fair alternative remained. That mechanism has a name: vendor lock-in. It is the point at which power has shifted entirely from the user to the vendor. And the vendor knows it.

Open source breaks that mechanism. Not because it is always free, but because the code does not belong to any single party. You can switch service providers without leaving your pedagogical masterworks behind. It is the school that holds the keys, not the platform operator.

There is more to it than that. Schools process sensitive data: pupil profiles, learning outcomes, communication between parents and teachers. When that data ends up with commercial platforms that can use it for their own purposes, that is not a hypothetical risk but a documented reality. Open source infrastructure on European servers, managed by the government itself, gives schools the assurance that their data is not being processed elsewhere as a by-product.

Then there is the question of sustainability. Open source tools do not disappear when a company pulls the plug or triples its prices. The code remains. The community remains. The investment does not go to waste.

And finally, the broader context: at a moment when dependence on American cloud infrastructure is more politically charged than ever. With the CLOUD Act giving American authorities access to data on foreign servers, with the debate on digital sovereignty being conducted from Brussels to Berlin, this is two million times choosing for privacy, or not.

What Digisprong has already built

Around those insights, Digisprong built a complete platform five years ago, specifically for education professionals.

In recent years, Digisprong launched the ICT Bootcamps: a free professional development programme for school teams, financed with more than a million euros. Schools could participate at no cost and received intensive guidance through the digital transition of their team. Not one teacher on a training day, but an entire team working through the programme together.

Digisprong also developed Digisnap, a self-reflection tool that allows teachers to map their own digital competencies based on the European DigCompEdu framework. Not a test with a score, but a compass pointing toward tailored professional development.

And there is Pictos, a planning tool that helps schools develop an ICT policy plan: from vision to analysis to action plan, step by step.

Each instrument builds on the one before it. Digisnap feeds Pictos. Pictos feeds the Bootcamps. The Bootcamps run on e-leren.be. e-leren.be runs on Moodle. It is an ecosystem, carefully constructed and with open source as its technical backbone.

The next step: open source as content

Until now, open source was the infrastructure of Digisprong. The toolbox. The foundation of the professional development environment.

That is changing now.

In early April 2026, the Kenniscentrum Digisprong published a new public procurement (reference number OND/KCDigisprong/2026/opensource). For the first time, open source is being deployed not only as a technical foundation but as the content theme of the professional development itself. The government is not only investing in open tools; it wants schools to understand why that choice makes sense and how to make it themselves.

The procurement covers two parts. The first is a complete online course catalogue of at least 40 modules on open source applications for teachers and ICT coordinators, offered on e-leren.be. From LibreOffice to pfSense, from Nextcloud to Keycloak: not an abstract story about open source in general, but concrete guidance for concrete situations in the classroom and the server room.

The second part consists of implementation trajectories for 50 schools or school groups that want to make an effective transition to open source in their ICT policy. Not a one-day workshop, but a multi-month process: a physical intake meeting, installation and configuration support, policy-level embedding, and per school concrete deliverables: a decision framework, a roadmap, additions to the ICT policy plan.

The total budget is up to 700,000 euros, with a duration of 27 months.

The focus shifts from “how do you use a tool” to “how do you build a digitally sovereign ICT policy”. Privacy, vendor lock-in and digital autonomy are practically part of the job description.

A word for schools writing their policy plan now

From 1 September 2026, an ICT policy plan will be mandatory for every school receiving Digiplan funding. The trajectories from this new procurement will not feed that first generation of policy plans — the timing is too tight for that.

But an ICT policy plan is not a document you write and then file away. It is a living document that evolves as knowledge and context change. And that knowledge is on its way.

Anyone writing their policy plan now would do well to keep it technology-neutral. Describe principles and objectives, not specific tools or platforms. “We ensure that pupil data is processed in accordance with GDPR requirements” is stronger than “we use platform XYZ”. The first keeps you agile. The second locks you in, just as teachers were locked in back in 2014.

Back to 2014

The lesson of eloV is actually very simple: whoever gives up control of their digital environment does not get it back easily. And the more that environment grows, the deeper the integrations become and the steeper the learning curve for staff, the higher the cost of any future switch.

Digisprong has internalised that lesson. Its own infrastructure runs on open source, the tools are freely available, and the knowledge stays in the public domain. That is not a small thing. It is precisely what was missing in 2014.

Many schools have since migrated to other platforms — some again with their own lock-in, others opting for open solutions.

The direction Digisprong is taking gives cause for cautious optimism. Not because the problem is solved, but because the right questions are finally being asked loudly enough, and because there is now not just funding but also policy behind them.

For more on the procurement itself — what it asks for concretely and what opportunities it offers for Flemish and Dutch-speaking organisations who want to be part of this story — read our follow-up article.

Sources