In 2003, the New Zealand Government established a pool of funding, to be administered by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), for eLearning capability development initiatives. This fund was called the e-Learning Collaborative Development Fund (eCDF) and was a contestable fundavailable to New Zealand tertiary education organisations. I say that our funding was modest given the objectives, because as with manygovernment funding mechanisms anywhere there can be a tendency to spread the allocations as broadly as possible among the various constituencies.
Thank-fully, TEC had a pre-determined viewpoint that OSS was worth exploring further with the objective of increasing the uptake of e-learning. In particular the eCDF sought to encourage a consolidated approach of tertiary education organisations sharing e-learning costs and systems where this is more efficient than individual organisations replicating investment. When reading the terms of reference in the funding documents, it was very obvious to us that OSS was a good fit although we were thinking in that direction anyway.
NZOSVLE was not the only OSS project funded. eXe, which I'm sure Wayne MacKintosh will discuss later. NZOSVLE also worked closely with the Open Source Courseware Initiative in NZ team who were undertaking language pack translations for Moodle. In subsequent rounds, TEC funded the OS Learning Object Repository project, the Open Access Repositories in New Zealand, and the Mahara ePortfolio. Eduforge also came about due to the eCDF. So, OSS has been a very significant theme and I'm forever grateful that TEC created this opportunity to establish OSS as such a large part of the landscape here.
It's inherent with any such fund that some of the dollars get swallowed up in items such as University overheads, ideas that “seemed good at the time” etc. but I'm really happy to say that the overheads for NZOSVLE were kept at a minimum and that we've had a really high success rate with getting quality code upstream into standard releases. For this, and making many of these projects the success they are, BIG thanks to Penny Leach, Martin Langhoff and the rest of the programming team for their massive input, much of it in their own time such has been their passion for what we're doing.
So, a good team was crucial to making it a good investment, having sound project principles, clear goals and vision. These are the things that make for successful projects. There's one other critical element that made a relatively small investment deliver such a wide ranging impact. Good timing, e.g. Sandy Britain and Oleg Liber's work on the pedagogy of LMSs, the options and growing maturity of OSS LMSs, the demand for infrastructure in the sector. . . a worldwide growing interest in OSS for education. Similarly the recent work on Mahara. I think this is good timing, we need options for OSS ePortfolio systems and I believe what we're trying to do with Mahara will resonate, early days but we're focused on getting the foundations right.
Thanks Ken for the discussion, and of course for the shared vision and many lunchtime walks we had when you were here in New Zealand and we were setting up NZOSVLE and Eduforge. It has been a very rewarding experience working with OSS in education these past four years and I feel we're still at the beginning - there's so much to do!
Cheers Richard Wyles
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