4.1 Innovation for education: oss and infrastructure for nz’s  (Page 7/9)

And in the example above, our work has a natural progression from initial strategic consulting towards design and development of exemplar courses, knowledge transfer to their staff, online coaching of e-tutors for the first course roll-outs - in short setting the foundations for a successful venture.

I would also like to add that, consistent with our strong advocacy and work with OSS, is our work and preference towards Open Educational Resources on the content side. It’s not always possible because it’s the client’s perogative, but the cross-pollination of design methodologies is something we’re finding beneficial. Despite the high profile projects from MIT and OUUK we don’t see many examples of purpose built OERS (as opposed to ‘after the fact’ opening) with the goal of ease of editing, extension and reuse. One trend is towards wikis and this is an important element but not the silver bullet. Wiki syntax is still arcane to many and wikis don’t deliver all the learning activities teachers and learners expect. I expect a suite of OER tools to soon develop as there’s certainly an itch…eXe is an example of this direction

8. ken udas - march 25th, 2007 at 6:49 pm

Richard, I want to go in another direction for a minute. I see how the NZOSVLE project reduced barriers to deploying eLeaning technology infrastructure (Moodle), which of course is a capacity building activity, but did you see evidence of capacity building in any of the participating institutions in terms of contributing to the open source community? That is, was there evidence that any of the schools learned how to contribute effectively to Moodle or any other OSS project?

I ask this because virtually every institution that is considering adopting an OSS learning management system talks about the potential benefit of modifying the code, which is probably one of the more challenging ways of contributing to a community. Did anybody develop competency and contribute code, documentation, training materials, etc., or at least become active in the forums or take leadership in any other way?

9. richardwyles - march 25th, 2007 at 7:19 pm

Yes, although naturally not in a uniform manner. This appears to be dependent on individuals and the orientation of an institution. Right at the outset, we formed the view that even if you selected the right platform, enhanced the code, provided good documentation, professional development training etc. then there would remain some barriers to entry, perceived or otherwise. The context was that there was little eLearning infrastructure being supported to begin with. For others, they could be supporting say BlackBoard in a hosting sense and while they obviously had an IT department, their skill-sets were not in supporting LAMP or OSS in general let alone contributing code of sufficient quality to the community. There are thankfully some exceptions but this was the general context in the New Zealand setting, remembering that many of our institutions are relatively small.

The solution was to provide economies of scale in hosting and support through a bureau service. We purchased high end hardware and set up an educational web hosting facility. Seven institutions now have their production LMS on a ‘common services’ infrastructure based in Wellington with disaster recovery systems in Auckland. We’re doing a similar thing with the Mahara ePortfolio system and our national network of institutional repositories. So, while some host themselves and have built capacity internally, others opt for a simple turn-key solution.