4.1 Innovation for education: oss and infrastructure for nz’s  (Page 8/9)

So, with that, the capacity building and expertise has consolidated around a clever team based at Catalyst IT, which have one of the biggest teams of Moodle expertise and OSS in general, globally. Catalyst has 75 developers specialising in OSS - this provides the level of commercial assurance that senior managers often need to make the switch to OSS.

10. ken udas - march 28th, 2007 at 4:44 am

Just as a little follow-up observation, I recall that there was a flurry of activity that followed the NZOSVLE project that I felt was relatively promising. These included the development and sharing of training materials and activities among some of the project partners and that the first NZ Moodle Moot leveraged the growing popularity of Moodle, but perhaps more importantly the growing understanding and acceptance of OSS in the sector.

Also I remember that a school oriented Moodle community was launched called Schoodle ( (External Link) ), which seems to have had some impact on the primary and secondary education sector. The project is self described as being “…committed to gain wide acceptance of Open Source Initiatives within New Zealand. This site has been created to allow teachers the opportunity to make informed choices on the issues surrounding the creation, maintenance and financing of digital learning environments within schools.”, which suggests that the Moodle focus can be translated into the larger potential of open source and community-based activities.

11. ken udas - march 29th, 2007 at 6:38 am

Here is one last question. This is sort of an open question for Richard, but if there is anybody following along with this who is in the know (or has an opinion), please feel free to contribute. In your posting you referred to a “…modest amount of government funding (given our goals)…” relative to the NZOSVLE project. Could you take just a moment to describe the government funding and its impact on the education sector? I am interested in learning a bit more about the potential connections between the government policy, their supporting programmes, and their effectiveness. All in all, would consider the NZ government investment that you referred to as a good investment? If so, what made it a good investment?

12. richardwyles - march 29th, 2007 at 4:46 pm

In 2003, the New Zealand Government established a pool of funding, to be administered by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), for eLearning capability development initiatives. This fund was called the e-Learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) and was a contestable fundavailable to New Zealand tertiary education organisations. I say that our funding was modest given the objectives, because as with manygovernment funding mechanisms anywhere there can be a tendency to spread the allocations as broadly as possible among the various constituencies.

Thank-fully, TEC had a pre-determined viewpoint that OSS was worth exploring further with the objective of increasing the uptake of e-learning. In particular the eCDF sought to encourage a consolidated approach of tertiary education organisations sharing e-learning costs and systems where this is more efficient than individual organisations replicating investment. When reading the terms of reference in the funding documents, it was very obvious to us that OSS was a good fit although we were thinking in that direction anyway.