Richard Wyles - Introduction - Innovation for Education: OSS and Infrastructure for NZ’s Education System 1.6 2007/06/28 12:52:02 GMT-5 2007/08/22 08:32:43.027 GMT-5 Ken Udas keu10@psu.edu Cecelia Merkel cbm12@psu.edu Moodle New Zealand Open Educational Resources (OER) Open Polytechnic of New Zealand Open Source Software (OSS) OSS and OER in Education Series Richard Wyles Introduction to Richard Wyles' contribution to the "OSS and OER in Education Series." In this post, he writes about networking Moodles across multiple institutions, the Mahara ePortfolio and related projects and will be providing some examples of how open source is delivering on the promise of innovation for education.

Richard Wyles - Introduction

Richard’s OSS series contribution focused around innovation for education and the infrastructure of New Zealand’s education system. Richard Wyles is a director and co-founder of Flexible Learning Network Ltd, a private company focused on flexible learning solutions for the education, corporate training and public sectors. For the past four years Richard has been leading national eLearning infrastructure projects in New Zealand, underpinned by open source and particularly Moodle. A full-time development team, now numbering around 10 programmers has been working continuously on Moodle and related open source projects since May 2004. Within a short period of time, Moodle is now the most widely used Learning Management System in New Zealand, particularly in the post-secondary vocational educational sector and increasingly within government sector departments. To coordinate these efforts and provide a place for stakeholders to contribute, Richard co-founded Eduforge. He currently leads several NZ Government funded projects including piloting a national eLearning Network in New Zealand - this work has led to a single-sign-on framework or Moodle Networks, and the NZ Open Educational Resources project.