4.1 Innovation for education: oss and infrastructure for nz’s  (Page 3/9)

Concurrently, we’ve been working on a new ePortfolio system. This is a bit of a departure for us because my preference is to build upon existing code-bases than start from scratch. We had been doing some work with Elgg but we got confronted with a design problem in that we couldn’t address the requirements of all the stakeholders in an ePortfolio system with the current architectures available. Mahara (Maori for thought or reflection) deals with this by having an Artifact, Views (templates to group artifacts) and Communities framework. The user can set the permissions on which communities can have access to which views. Still early days on this but we’re very excited by the potential with Mahara. Multiple institutions are using a shared instance at MyPortfolio.ac.nz and that in itself is very rewarding as that level of collaboration would not have been possible only a year or two ago. You can learn more about Mahara by viewing the documents and we will have a demonstrator up soon. Naturally rich interoperability with Moodle is part of the plan and is currently in development.

Another key part of the VLE is a national network of repositories, both for courseware and research output. This is more recent work but we followed the same successful process when selecting the LMS. The technical review pointed to using Fedora for the OAI-PMH national hub and hosted solution while, with some work, Eprints is a good option for ease of deployment at individual institutions. Enhancements we’ve been making include RSS feeds from Fedora, ratings, add comments, nested collections, a DIY configuration tool for Eprints, and a SRW/U service to be adapted for Fedora which will become the basis of the web front end search on the hub and is adaptable for the likes of FEZ and Moodle. I’m probably getting a bit technical here but the idea is to harvest all of NZ’s research output and make it more easily accessible. In parallel we want courseware repositories to be accessible to tutors/teachers/ instructional designers with easy federated search at the course set-up level.

With leads me on to our work on open educational resources but that’s a whole other story…

In summary, what I’m trying to convey with this post is that we’ve been quite busy building what amounts to some significant national infrastructure for NZ’s education system. I like to think that our innovation is end-user / demand driven which is made possible by working with open source technologies. And because it’s open source we can leverage the innovations of others and vice versa.

Our team at Catalyst , the Flexible Learning Network , and consortium partners in the education sector such as the Open Polytechnic are committed to the open source paradigm. It solves a lot of problems for us. When working with open source solutions, the playing field becomes a lot more level as the aggregation of capital is not such of a factor - ideas and capability become the new currency. And for end-users we can deliver innovations and some fit-for-purpose outcomes not otherwise possible. A small but cogent example is that Moodle now has Maori, Tongan and Samoan language packs - important for our native Pacific Island communities. Which proprietary LMS can boast that?