4.1 Innovation for education: oss and infrastructure for nz’s  (Page 5/9)

David Sturrock, Flexible Learning Team Leader, Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology

3. richardwyles - march 22nd, 2007 at 9:40 pm

Sorry to cross-post comments here but to pick up on the thread we had earlier about interoperability, SOAs etc. then I suspect Patrick and my philosophies are actually quite well aligned. To illustrate, have a look at the conceptual diagrams used in our proposals back in 2003 and then again in 2004:

(External Link)

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While I didn’t know the jargon for SOAs back in 2003, the concept of separating out the feature-set was very firmly in our mind. And I think we made some good decisions. I believe that Moodle is a route to the same end. At present Moodle can be described as a cohesive LMS. But the architecture does adhere to good principles of “loose coupling”. I believe Moodle will evolve into a form of ‘LMS operating system’ for want of a better descriptive title. By this I mean there will be a framework using web services communicating with a “core operating system” to achieve very flexible configurations. I haven’t caught up with Martin Dougiamas since mid last year but will be in a month’s time and the evolution of Moodle is always a topic of discussion!

4. ken udas - march 23rd, 2007 at 6:07 am

Richard, thank you for the response relating to the growth of LMS deployments and the role that the NZOSVLE project had in reducing participation barriers for eLearning (particularly in financially fragile institutions). Were there any other outcomes that flowed from the project and the use of OSS?

That is, did you note additional inter-institutional collaboration around other features of eLearning? You referred to the original group of 8 institutions that participated in the NZOSVLE project as a “consortium” which seems to infer collaboration. Is this true, and if so, was the collaboration confined to deploying and maintaining learning technologies? I am probing to see if you saw “secondary” impact on the sector or at least among the participating institutions.

I have a follow-up question already, but will wait for this response first.

5. richardwyles - march 23rd, 2007 at 6:54 pm

It’s hard to quantify but certainly, in the same way that if you build a road you will get cars on it, we noticed and were gratified by the upswing in elearning activity due to enabling the foundational infrastructure. Due to this, there has been some significant inter-institutional collaboration however I must qualify that because much of it has been more informal, ad hoc and across middle layers between faculties, eLearning managers, instructional designers etc.

So, while there has been a secondary impact, it could be much more so from my viewpoint if there was a more strategic framework to support it. In many ways, our efforts have been very much “bottom up”and I suspect most Chief Executives and Academic Managers are not fully aware of the potential of what we’ve been doing. That’s understandable, the power of Web 2.0 and networked environments are foreign to many people’s working lives (currently!). We are endeavouring to encourage the direction towards more meaningful collaboration with the Moodle Networks project which I’m very excited about. And, while the wheels of bureaucracy naturally turn (External Link) slowly, the drivers behind networked education and inter-institutional collaboration are inescapable. We will see much more tangible evidence of the evolution of this framework over 2007 and into 2008.