Case study: The Open University Virtual Learning Environment Programme

The Open University http://www.open.ac.uk

"Over the past three years the Open University has developed a new virtual learning environment for its many distance learners based on the open source system, Moodle. OU students now have a robust system for managing their learning with interactive content and the ability to interact better using Web 2.0 technologies.

Meanwhile the initiative has had an impact far beyond the OU, with many colleges, universities and other organisations adopting Moodle partially as a result of the OU's decision to select it and invest £5m in a programme to enhance the software and roll it out across the institution."

"The OU virtual learning environment was delivered on time in three main releases during a development programme which ran from Oct 2005 to July 2008. Extensive requirements gathering activities led to the development of major enhancements to Moodle, most of which have been fed back into the publicly-available version of the software now in use across the UK and internationally. Developments included enhancements to ensure that Moodle is accessible by learners with a wide range of disabilities. New functionality includes a new gradebook, an eportfolio system, a wiki optimised for use in education, and improvements for mobile learners such as a podcasting module.

The development of the software was accompanied by a major change management programme involving consultation, communications and staff development activities, resulting in a transfer of learning content and activities for the great majority of OU courses to the VLE.

By May 2008, there were 535 active courses on the OU VLE with more than 80,000 students accessing the system. 14% of courses are now using interactive tools such as blogs and wikis. These figures are set to increase considerably in late 2008 with the release of new VLE-based level 1 courses in several popular subject areas.

Optimisations to the Moodle codebase and a robust supporting infrastructure have ensured that the system is available as planned more than 95.5% of the time.

The OU's decision to adopt the software is widely considered to be the tipping point for organisations who wished to move to an open source virtual learning environment.

Recent surveys have shown that 23% of higher education institutions and 59% of further education colleges in the UK are now using Moodle â€' a dramatic change from three years ago when most institutions were using commercial VLEs."

The OU received a Mellon Award in 2006 for its 'massive institutional commitment to Moodle' and recognised its 'leadership in bringing Moodle to the next level of performance, scalability and enterprise-readiness' â€' see http://matc.mellon.org/winners/winner-2006"

Most development work on Moodle was carried out in-house however outsourcing also took place:
• CatalystIT in New Zealand and pteppic.net in the UK provided initial support in using and developing the Moodle platform while skills were being developed in-house
• Accessibility enhancements, improvements to the quiz module and a new roles and permissions architecture were outsourced to Moodle.com in Perth, Australia
• Excelsoft India redeveloped the voting and podcasting modules.

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Background: e-Government National Awards
The e-Government National Awards 2008 recognise "best of the best" strategies, achievements, teams and individuals in UK public sector web, ICT & e-Government services. The Awards were presented 20th January 2009 in the City of London Guildhall by Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson MP, and Government CIO John Suffolk. Prime Minister the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP joined the awards dinner via video link. Watch the Prime Minister's speech on YouTube at this link

The Awards winners are listed at this link

Platinum sponsor was KPMG.
Also sponsors were O2, Directgov, and Jadu.

The Awards were supported by the Government Chief Information Officer (Cabinet Office), the Society of Information Technology Management (Socitm), and SOLACE (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers).