4.1 Innovation for education: oss and infrastructure for nz’s

The saying goes that necessity is the mother of invention. Innovation is somewhat different, it can be incremental improvements, a new way of using something, or the thinking that underpins radical invention. When it comes to innovation there’s two quite distinct drivers. One is the norm in the proprietary software world - that is supplier side innovation. To differentiate a product a supplier will spend on R&D and commercialise and often protect their innovations with patent law. While this model is reasonably efficient in open competitive markets, a significant problem remains in that it largely ignores end-user or demand-side innovation. I say largely because any successful proprietary software vendor, will of course, take demand signals such as customer feedback into account when designing new releases. The problems are that there are time lags, inefficiencies in communication flow and inherent prioritisation of resources that ignores both niche and emergent need (e.g. Does Blackboard have a Maori language pack?). Patents are also designed to limit the diffusion of innovation and thereby protect the competitive advantage that the innovation provides. Problems drive innovation!

Thinking back to 2003 when I first started getting involved in elearning technology, there was a recognised problem in New Zealand’s education system. eLearning was very unevenly spread and quite understandably. New Zealand is reasonably large in geographical terms - a little bit larger than Britain. However, the population is small at 4 million people and we’re geographically isolated - the distance between Wellington and Sydney is not too far off the distance between London and Moscow. It’s a developed Western nation but unusually the economy is largely reliant on agricultural exports. The education sector is well served with 7 universities, 20 institutes of technology and polytechnics, 3 wananga plus many smaller private training companies. Many of the polytechnics are regionally based, serving smaller more rural population centres.

Map depicting lms market in nz in 2003

In 2003 there wasn’t a lot of eLearning infrastructure. With an initial consortium of 8 institutions, and a modest amount of government funding (given our goals), we started the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment (NZOSVLE) project. Our first recognisable problem was that this project was going to be very hard to manage without some suitable tools to help. After looking about, finding nothing at that time that solved the problem and thinking our need can’t be unique, we came up with the idea of Eduforge . Eduforge delivers the same services as does Sourceforge but with some additional collaboration and communication tools such as project based blogging and wikis. We’ve endeavoured to support the needs of both technologists and others in the education community that may be less technically focused. Indeed, there are many projects hosted on Eduforge that have little to do with software. Eduforge is an open access environment - it is not aligned to any institution, it is free to use and has projects from throughout the world. Eduforge could be described as an accidental outcome of the NZOSVLE project. We’ve made some improvements since first launching in February 2004 and we’ll keep evolving the platform. As a trivial aside, Eduforge is now hosted at a data centre in Dallas, Texas to reduce latency for users in many parts of the world.