RW: In late 2003, the Tertiary Education Commission, an arm of the New Zealand Government implemented a contestable fund for e-learning capability. We were successful with a proposal to select and further work on an open source Learning Management System suitable for the NZ education environment. We selected Moodle in early 2004 and the project team has been very active in the Moodle community ever since.

Eduforge was, sort of, a foundation part of that project as it allows us to collaborate across geographically spread consortium partners.

Of course it’s now turned into a major project in its own right. Recently we received some much appreciated help from the eXe project (http://www.exelearning.org/)

TF: How will the service be developed/extended?

RW: The next initiative we have is to establish an online academic journal or journals that can be accessed via Eduforge. I'm also keen to further develop the RSS feeds area on Planet Eduforge.

TF: Is this an idea whose time has come?

RW: I certainly believe that we've hit an inflection point when it comes to using open source solutions in education. There’s some really major projects going underway with some large enterprise level deployments. Open source is a proven, viable alternative to commercial systems.

The Eduforge team would like to be part of the landscape that continues in this direction. Open Source is a real driver for innovation in education and it’s a lot of fun to be involved.

Thank-you for the opportunity for the interview.

Richard Wyles and the team at Eduforge.

https://eduforge.org/blog/blog.php?/archives/120-Origins-and-Objectives-of- Eduforge.html