18 October 2010, 16:01

Wellington, UK – October 18th, 2010

Three leading e-learning and open source companies have formed a joint venture company to develop and distribute a specific version of the Moodle Learning Management System for the corporate sector.

The new joint venture company to be known as Totara has been formed by three partner companies, two of which manage the direction and development of Mahara:

Flexible Learning Network – An innovative New Zealand based e-learning company that leads the Mahara e-portfolio project, the most popular open source e-portfolio system world-wide and often used in combination with Moodle.

Catalyst IT – A leading open source company based in New Zealand, Australia and the UK. Catalyst are one of the core Moodle developers and have one of the largest Moodle development teams. Catalyst are also the lead Mahara developers.

Kineo – A leading global e-learning company with offices in the US, UK, Israel and the Pacific. Kineo have been pioneers of adapting Moodle for the corporate sector with over 80 corporate Moodle clients including Tesco, Cable&Wireless, Timberland and BP.

The new corporate distribution of Moodle includes a wide range of new features designed to meet the need of corporates such as competency management, staff development plans, team management, management of classroom events, individual and corporate dashboard reporting. This is of interest to Mahara users as Mahara is a "sister app" to Moodle and therefore works very well alongside Totara.

Richard Wyles, Director of Flexible Learning, commented: “This is a really exciting project. Moodle is already the world’s most popular LMS and we’ve been working with Moodle in various contexts for around seven years now. We believe the idea of standardizing some of our innovations to deliver a specific workplace learning distribution will result in Totara rapidly becoming the LMS of choice in the corporate sector.”

Mike O’Connor, Founder and Director of Catalyst IT commented: “The Totara partnership has bought together three really strong companies committed to developing a world beating LMS for the corporate sector which leverages all the benefits of open source software.  We will also be leveraging the geographical spread and size of the three companies to provide a responsive and follow the sun support service to our clients.”

Steve Rayson, Kineo’s Managing Partner commented: “We know from our Moodle work with clients from Nike to Toshiba, that there is a real appetite for an open source corporate LMS. The Totara solution provides a professional, scalable LMS at a fraction of the cost of proprietary solutions.”

The new Totara distribution is initially available to clients of Kineo, Catalyst and Flexible Learning Network. It will be made publicly available in January 2011. In the interim interested companies wishing to view a demo or pre-order Totara can contact their regional representative as follows:

US   Steve Lowenthal    
UK & Europe  Steve Rayson     
Pacific   Richard Wyles or Mike O'Connor