Educational IT and internet tenders flourish
Internet learning and IT management systems are spreading in education at a rate of knots, though limitations on broadband capacity remain a problem. A look through a score of e-learning tenders, collated by TenderSearch in recent months, shows schools, TAFE institutions and universities active in five main areas.
These areas are educational portals for supplementary curriculum material; management systems for administration, student accommodation and finance; electronic libraries including copyright and internet issues; distance learning including marketing of Australian skills abroad; and software to stop students clogging campus networks with music copying (up to 70 per cent of total traffic on some campuses).
The biggest venture in on-line content is the Le@rning Federation initiative sponsored by Federal and State Governments in Australia, plus New Zealand. This collective initiative operates through the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA).
A Le@rning Federation Steering Group oversees content preparation through two companies, Curriculum Corporation and education.au limited. Until 2006, these outfits are concentrating on science, mathematics and numeracy, literacy for students at risk, language training in Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese, studies of Australia and work on innovation, enterprise and creativity.
In IT management, Western Australia and Queensland are well advanced with new state-wide school management systems. At end 2002, Western Australia had 600 schools plugged in to a school information system software package (SIS) to manage school administration, financial management and curriculum delivery.
Education Queensland is in the early stages of a new school management system to service 51,000 employees and 475,000 students and their parents, with 35 business functions including financial reporting, timetabling and student administration.
Broadband bottlenecks should generate a flow of future tenders. A tender closing in June, 2003 had the Universities of Sydney, NSW, Technology, Western Sydney and New England, plus Charles Sturt University and ANSTO testing the market for cost effective broad band services. Melbourne Girls Grammar late last year sought a dual campus gigabit ethernet network, while the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane needed area network services for 135 schools.
Educational IT and internet functions should continue to generate a diverse range of tenders for years ahead.
Christopher Jay is a writer for the Australian Financial Review. He is a regular contributor to its Tenderwatch column in the Friday Government & Business Section.
As published in the TenderSearch Magazine - Winter 2003 Issue
