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.
So, with that, the capacity building and expertise has consolidated around a clever team based at Catalyst IT, which have one of the biggest teams of Moodle expertise and OSS in general, globally. Catalyst has 75 developers specialising in OSS - this provides the level of commercial assurance that senior managers often need to make the switch to OSS.
- 901 reads
