Miria Royal
Student

Miria Royal is a Year 13 student at St Marys College, where she is the leader of the school Tech Crew. Miria is passionate about technology with education and is interested in physics, robotics and Maori contemporary art. Next year, she hopes to study science at university.

Nicholas Green
Business New Zealand

Nicholas is Business New Zealand’s adviser on education and training issues, as well as immigration and Maori and Pacific business.  He has worked in a number of roles across the education sector, including at the Ministry of Education, Aotearoa Polytechnic Students’ Union, New Zealand University Students’ Association, Industry Training Federation, Tertiary Education Advisory Commission and Tertiary Education Commission.  Immediately prior to joining Business New Zealand in 2006, Nicholas worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, where he covered counter-terrorism and regional security matters.

Kathy Holloway
Whitireia Community Polytechnic

Kathy Holloway is Associate Dean of Faculty of Health Education and Social Sciences at Whitireia Community Polytechnic, Porirua.  Her background is in Nursing education at both undergraduate and postgraduate level as a nurse lecturer. She has been involved e-learning as an enthusiastic early adopter as both an educator and a postgraduate student.  She writes a monthly column Webscope for the national NZ Nursing Review (and occasionally for NZ Education Review) commenting on the use of the internet in nursing and in education.

Richard Wyles
Flexible Learning Network Ltd

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.

Richard has a strong association with a number of tertiary educational instititions, and for the past three and a half years has been managing eLearning Capability Development Fund projects on behalf of projects' consortia and the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. Of particular note has been the work on Moodle and related open source projects since early 2004. Within a short period of time, Moodle is now the most widely used LMS in NZ, particularly in the ITP sector and increasingly in other sectors.

To coordinate these efforts and provide a place for stakeholders to contribute, Richard co-founded Eduforge. Richard is currently completing the eLearning Networked Education pilot project - this work has led to a single-sign-on framework or Moodle Networks, and the NZ Open Educational Resources project.

Presentation slides (8.3MB PPT)

Presentation slides (3MB PDF)

Rachel Skudder
Director of Programmes, BEST Pacific Institute of Education, Auckland

Rachel Skudder is the Director of Programmes at BEST Pacific Institute of Education. BEST is a Pacific dedicated institution, with campuses in West and South Auckland where 80% of the 1600 strong student body are Pacific and Maori adults. Rachel has been a part of the leadership team who pioneered a flexible delivery programme in 2001 for 80 students which has now grown to 800 students. Developing a vibrant community culture has been integral to this flexible delivery environment. Students enrolled in BEST's "Fresh e" flexible learning programmes, attend weekly on-campus tutorials and access online sessions from home. "Fresh e" delivers seven NZQA qualifications from L3-5 including two national diplomas.

Presentation slides (10.2MB PPT)

Presentation slides (1MB PDF)