Flexible Learning Network was formed to focus on strategy, learning design, content development, training and coaching. So, with our service streams we are different to the likes of Moodle.com, LAMS Foundation or something like RedHat Linux because we're focused on good practice use of a range of tools - we're not tool specific. In fact we have clients that use proprietary applications.
We still work on infrastructure but more in an advisory or project management capacities (and the bigger the project the better ;-). For example, recently we've been consulting for a global shipping company which operates out of over 50 countries but has their headquarters in Dubai. They're in the process of setting up a corporate academy and I'm finding this departure from traditional educational structures interesting. In these types of roles naturally we strongly advise towards the benefits of OSS. Flexible Learning is an associate company of Catalyst IT which is a specialist OSS services company with about 75 programmers all working on open source. Working closely with them is a major point of difference for us. For example, we know that we have really strong expertise in enterprise Moodle, Fedora, Eprints, Mahara and then a whole host of other OSS systems and technologies for any customised developments that can form part of the solution suite. Combined, the two companies can deliver a very comprehensive service offering (sales hat firmly on here ;-)
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
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