4.1 Innovation for education: oss and infrastructure for nz’s  (Page 4/9)

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14 Responses to “Innovation for Education - OSS and Infrastructure for NZ’s Education System”

1. ken udas - march 21st, 2007 at 5:18 pm

Richard, I might as well kick things off. I notice from your 2003 and 2006 (before and after) graphics that the number of LMS deployments grew from 11 in 2003 to 18 in 2006. Do you think that the increased total number of deployments was a consequence of the general growth of online learning globally? That is, do you think that the growth was independent of the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project? Why?

2. richardwyles - march 21st, 2007 at 11:23 pm

Hi Ken. Actually I’m sure the graphics are a little inaccurate - there’s more Moodles! The maps represent what is called the ‘institute of technology and polytechnic sector’ in New Zealand. Certainly there’s been global growth in online learning over this time period. The problem we faced was that some were being left behind - a digital divide was quite clear between new Zealand’s larger institutions and the smaller regional ones. Even those institutions who were investing tended to stop at the Blackboard Basic edition rather than the full suite.

To answer this properly it’s worth quoting from one of our project partners on how the NZOSVLE lowered the barriers to entry. Overall, in the first year or so, we saw the “have-nots” becoming “haves” as they adopted production level LMSs. More recently we’re seeing a lot of migration from the likes of Blackboard and WebCT to Moodle.

“Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT) is a regional Polytechnic serving a rapidly growing but widely dispersed population across the top of the South Island. This geographic spread combined with some of the highest levels of employment in the country provides significant challenges for NMIT in maintaining our viability and relevancy. A project was established in 2003 to select and implement a commercial Learning Management System to support the flexible access to learning materials. However, up-front costs of hardware, license and local technical support proved too great a barrier in difficult financial times and we lacked experience or confidence in utilising Open Source systems.

The advent of the NZOSVLE project has changed all this. Moodle is a highly functional, stable and relatively intuitive LMS compared to many of the commercial products. An external service provider now hosts our installation of Moodle and the quality of the support available via the NZOSVLE project and the wider Moodle user community has been outstanding. Rather than pay for expensive hardware and license fees, a greater percentage of available funds have been able to be used to establish an internal support team. The Flexible Learning team is now working on a number of online development projects and supporting a growing number of teaching staff as they explore utilising Moodle to enhance their current classroom-based courses.

NMIT looks forward to utilising this and other systems to better meet the learning needs of our communities. Where possible we will continue to support the use and development of Open Source systems in NZ education.”