2012 Innovation Fund

The NetSpot Innovation Fund has been established to provide funding to incorporate selected technologies into Moodle with the aim of sustainability via the Moodle ecosystem.

One of the concerns in Tertiary Education in Australasia and probably globally is the sustainability of eLearning innovations.

In recent times, various funding sources have stimulated the creation of innovative services or products in the eLearning space. Inevitably, some of these projects have been popularly received during their early stages of development with a significant degree of usage and adoption. At this point, the notion of sustainability becomes relevant. Having established a user-base, the innovation either needs to be supported by the individual (person, department, university) or by the community of users for it to be sustained over the long term. There needs to be leadership; someone or some organisation that drives the innovation, coordinates activity, engages the community, establishes the vision and articulates the pathway forward. There are also issues of technical support and providing specialist advice to technology adopters.

This requires an investment in time and money; a commitment if you will, and as we know in the vast majority of cases, innovations are not sustained when funding is removed and the investment required cannot be found.

In the tertiary setting, most funding for eLearning initiatives is project based and while independence and user choice around elearning technologies is definitely something to be encouraged, there are clear benefits in framing these activities within existing systems which can provide a degree of commercial scaffolding such as product distribution, professional services and ongoing development frameworks.

An example of a viable commercial scaffold may be integration with existing, sustainable, eLearning innovation such as Moodle that has already reached a critical mass of users and can therefore become the vehicle for sustainability of this new innovation. The benefits of an approach based on product sustainability via the Moodle community are that the innovation is freely available; commercial partners are available as potential sales and service providers; the maintenance of the innovation can be either the responsibility of the originator or may be picked up by a volunteer (individual, institution, corporate) who have their own reasons/reward for providing this effort and there is a greater likelihood of broader applicability.

NetSpot proposes to support the sector by creating a $200,000 eLearning Innovation Fund with the specific aim of sustaining proven eLearning innovations. In a sense this is further funding for seed projects that have demonstrated the potential for sustainability. NetSpot Innovation Fund projects offer multiple benefits to the tertiary education sector:

• Organisations benefit from new opportunities to form partnerships with other tertiary institutions;
• Individuals benefit from contributing to, and exposure in the tertiary sector and growing their knowledge and expertise of the products;
• Moodle community benefits through active contributions and new code.
  

The Innovation Fund is open to institutions in tertiary education sector based in the Asia Pacific region. Individual applicants must be members of either ascilite, HERDSA and/or ODLAA. Suitable fund applicants include:

• eLearning administrators
• LMS managers
• Tertiary teaching and learning faculty staff
• Tertiary faculties with a seed technology project that requires funding for development.

Criteria for successful fund applicants include:

• The organisations are Australasian based;
• The fund application is for second round funding for a proven eLearning innovation and the application can demonstrate significant acceptance or interest within the Tertiary Education sector;
• At least one member of the project team is a member of ascilite, HERDSA or ODLAA;
• The application has the support of the university senior management;
• The application must be multi-institutional;
• The eLearning innovation must be open-source and use the GPL v3 license;
• The eLearning innovation must enhance Moodle (by extending the features and functions of Moodle through development of new extensions or by integrating Moodle with external systems); it is essentially a software development project;
• The innovation does not have to be a new tool; it could be changing the way an existing tool is used.

Funded projects will:

• Support cross institution collaboration;
• Be based on an existing innovation;
• Enhance the capabilities of Moodle;
• Benefit the tertiary education sector; and
• Be freely shared.
  

Applicants may apply for funding from $10,000 - $50,000.

Funding will be paid in three payments, 40% on commencement, 40% on receipt of mid-year report and 20% at completion.

Applicants will be asked to demonstrate value for money, including in-kind contributions.

Funding can be used for:

• Project management;
• Project roles eg technical resources, content development, facilitator, project manager;
• Technical support and communications;
• Software development (note that NetSpot can provide software development resources in lieu of the cash grant or a component of it);
• Production of relevant training materials and documentation;
• Administrative costs;
• Project delivery costs eg facilitating cross institution collaboration;
• Travel and registration costs for 1 project member to present at MoodleMoot 2012.

Funding cannot be used for:

• Purchasing infrastructure, equipment or software;
• Training or professional development projects.