Inland Revenue's use of Moodle

Your Nomination
Title for nomination: 

Inland Revenue's use of Moodle

Nominee's name or organisation: 

Inland Revenue

Overview of your nomination: 

As an early adopter of Moodle open source software, Inland Revenue has been a leader for NZ Government agencies in its use and adaptation. Inland Revenue’s 6200 staff access around 1200 courses, both face-to-face and e-learning. It has been consistently proactive in championing Moodle to other agencies, initiating working with other agencies to develop common business functionality, and supporting other agencies in their Moodle journey. This award would recognise this effort. Inland Revenue deployed Moodle as its Learning Management System (LMS) in 2006. Right from the start it was embraced by both the business and users. Usage levels have consistently grown as has the diversity of training and development resources available. In 2010 almost all internal training, approximately 1200 courses, is accessed through the LMS and all external training is booked through the site. It is widely recognised across the public sector as setting the benchmark for an LMS deployment and implementation. The academic underpinnings of the Moodle software led Inland Revenue to develop, through Catalyst IT, additional functionality to support Inland Revenue’s business requirements. Initially, Inland Revenue sought development partners from other Government agencies with an emphasis on cost sharing. This led to building more complete and robust modules that covered more use cases and also more likely to be up streamed into the core Moodle software. The non-financial benefits of working with other NZ Government agencies soon became much greater than the cost savings achieved. This is typified in the development of the Face-to-Face module, and subsequent series of enhancements interrelated to it. The Face-to-Face module solved many common challenges with offering and scheduling training in-person. A series of additions, given freely and in a manner likely to increase adoption by other agencies, have rapidly grown the module into a solid feature rich tool that delivers significant business benefits. The enhancements are now a core part of corporate Moodle internationally

Reasons for winning this award: 

Moodle is a success story in open source software in the NZ public sector. Many parties have participated and contributed across the Public Sector; Inland Revenue, TEC, MSD, DoC, Police, LDC, ACC, Housing Corp, Chief Electoral Office, DIA, Ministry of Health, Statistics and Flexible Learning Network, and the Catalyst IT Moodle team. Moodle has momentum and is in early deployment stages at several other agencies. The collaborative work, and at times gentle competitiveness between, NZ Government agencies has significantly enhanced the already robust open source software package - Moodle. The benefits to the agencies involved are more targeted and cost effective training at the time required. This reduces the total cost to the Crown and improves the public experience of its agencies. Inland Revenue has been, for Government agencies, an early adopter of Moodle. It has been consistently proactive in championing Moodle to other agencies, initiating working with other agencies to develop common business functionality, and supporting other agencies in their Moodle journey. This award would recognise this effort.

Supporting Information
Use and benefits of open source: 

The nature of Inland Revenue’s work is such that the confidentiality of tax payer information and supporting systems are taken very seriously. As well as a legislative obligation safe guarding confidentiality is part of Inland Revenue’s core culture. The open nature of, and of soliciting openness, engaging in Open Source software projects is not considered an obvious choice for us. Further, the Moodle software is focused on academic use and Inland Revenue’s corporate style learning & development needs are not directly catered for. Despite this the absence of licensing requirements and low costs of localised development make Moodle an attractive option. The modular nature of the software makes the development process relatively inexpensive and can be completed within short time frames. The public sector has received much greater value from its individual spend, shared its best practices and supported agencies introducing a Learning Management System by working with together on common needs,. The key benefits found are: • Cost. This encourages innovation as the cost/benefit equation is simpler to meet and the approval process cycle is shorter. It has often been observed that Inland Reveue’s new functionally is generally developed and deployed at a cost less than the initial estimation costs on equivalent commercial software. • Speed. This is a function of an open, well documented and modular software framework. New and significant changes in functionality can be conceived, built and deployed in months – often quicker. • Ownership, and practical design making, is embedded deep in the business. Inland Revenue’s business Learning & Development community have been able to directly change it’s LMS – determining priorities, contributing funding and setting/enforcing policies. While this can also be true of commercial software the difference is that this ownership is at lower hierarchical level and combined with the cost & speed benefits is a very tangible benefit. • Sharing - the benefits from which have been the most significant for Inland Revenue. The open source development process encourages sharing practices and knowledge. Inland Revenue have found consistent value in understanding how other agencies have solved similar issues and then leveraged off the most successful – sometimes without incurring cost.

Recent achievements: 

Staff self-schedule around 25,000 seats in face-to-face training & development activities each year via Moodle. Improvements to the processes and reduction in the administration overhead represent material cost savings. Introduction of a new Calendar – live January 2010 This is a modification of the existing Moodle Calendar. It displays Face-to-face events with filters for regions/cities, type of training, and intended audience. It is automatically populated and replaces the manual calendars maintained. It enables greater visibility of training offerings and by region enables travel cost savings. Single business wide evaluation on all training – live July 2010. This automates the collecting of reaction to training evaluation (Level 1): • staff are prompted (and reminded) to complete an online evaluation form on course completion, • trainers, and their managers, can see their own summarised evaluation for their courses (this is live data and has been complex to realise in our environment as many courses have many different trainers), • course owners have a clear, and comparative, picture of learner feedback, • L&D have consistent & comparable evaluation data across all types of training.

Plans for future work: 

Inland Revenue’s aim for July 2011 is to incorporate the Individual Development Planing process tightly into the subsequent selection of training & development activities for all staff. This is to improve the course selection behaviour, improve training need forecasting, and also present appropriate non-training development activities. To achieve this they will be leveraging the recently developed Moodle Industry Training Management System modules (jointly funded by Tertiary Education Commission, Open Polytechnic and ITO’s such as Learning State). Inland Revenue will develop new course tagging and course promotion code and expect interest and likely co-funding from other agencies with similar staff development approaches. Inland Revenue plan to improve the Staff member and Team Leader interface to Moodle to provide greater clarity over what training/development has occurred (tracked against Development Plans) and personalisation options for those who need to met evidence of their continuing development for their professional accreditation e.g. NZ Institute of Chartered Accountants and NZ Law Society. Much further in to the future, Inland Revenue is exploring corporate type social networking through the LMS to enhance knowledge transfer and collaborative knowledge building.

Websites and other information: 

Learning State host a shared Moodle for NZ Government agencies to list their courses and share spare capacity in in-person training sessions. http://mydevelopment.learningstate.govt.nz/