Leveraging Open Source Software to Achieve Financial Sustainability for Australian TAFEs.

— Opinion Piece – Andrew Boag, CEO, Catalyst IT Australia —

This article was originally published on Andrew’s LinkedIn Page.

We should never underestimate the power of community. Productive collaborations and innovations happen when people and organisations of similar values and goals come together, share their stories – successes and failures – and learn from each other.

In some situations, commercial and competitive factors get in the way; in other, working together and standardising systems and tools makes a lot of sense from the operational and financial sustainability perspectives. The Technical and Further Education (TAFE) sector in Australia is a classic example where standardisation makes sense and should be supported, if not incentivised by the governments.

Standardisation can be applied in various aspects of the business, including the tech stack which in fact, is at the core of smooth operations and education delivery.

As Anders Sorman-Nilsson from Thinque put it: “today, all of us are essentially tech companies but with different licenses … education providers too, are tech companies with a license to educate” (The Future of Education for a Humanist Age, THETA 2023). I agree with this statement seeing how data and tech centric education providers have become, and increasingly so in the last 5 years, since remote and blended learning delivery became a necessity. 2020 was a shock to the system and all the stakeholders involved, including teachers, students and internal tech teams. To this day, all of them need a whole new level of support which again, very much relies on technology.

Before I dive any further into the actual tech conversation, let’s look at some of the key facts and figures surrounding TAFEs in Australia from the last five years.

Let’s talk about TAFEs.

TAFEs across Australia deliver thousands of courses to hundreds of thousands of students and are critical for our country’s prosperity.

Not to make too fine a point of it, but without our local TAFE institutions and their apprenticeship and certifications, our society couldn’t build houses (carpenters), maintain critical infrastructure (plumbers), run airports (Aircraft maintenance technicians) or look beautiful (hairdressers). Vocational training is such a critical part of modern society.

In addition, TAFEs provide pathways to universities, serving as a stepping stone for aspiring professionals in all sorts of fields including medical (nursing), business and information technology.

According to the Australia’s Institute Centre for Future Work, the TAFE system has proven to bridge skill gaps, improve accessibility to education and increase employability, fostering a combined and ongoing flow of total economic benefits worth $92.5 billion to the Australian economy in 2019. Then, came the COVID years.

“TAFEs’ long held plans and aspirations for online connected learning literally geared-up overnight,” stated Mary Faraone, TAFE Directors Australia Chair. “TAFEs, committed to their public mission, have responded to the new world with technology based learning and new courses to support businesses that needed new skills.” (Source)

My research tells me that it was collaboration that helped the Australian TAFE Network get through uncertainties and change, as “ideas, resources and professional development were readily shared among individual TAFEs”.

More tailored learning, uplift in quality of teaching and learning resources, improved capabilities in digital learning and technologies, and even increased engagement from some student cohorts were just some of the positive results of this collaborative transformation.

Drawing on the synergies with community powered collaborations in other settings, such as the open education or the open-source software movements, I commend the Australian TAFE Network for coming together to address the necessary and speedy digital transformation. New tools, digitisation of courses, staff training, new student engagement strategies, online assessments processes and blended learning delivery modes – a lot of work goes into all that and what the Network has delivered is quite an achievement!

The introduction of free TAFE courses to help economic and social recovery after the Pandemic, and the fact that almost 200,000 Australians enrolled in the free courses in the matter of the first 3 months – between April and June 2020, has proven that TAFEs form an excellent pathway to get people back into (or to help them remain in) the workforce.

TAFE as a network has proven a powerful tool for governments, students and industry during COVID-19. A network of TAFEs leveraging expertise within each is a key ingredient to lift quality and drive excellence. This sets the benchmark for the self-assurance aspirations the Australian Skills Quality Authority has set for VET.” – Source, p35.

While the benefits of the new digital delivery for TAFEs were many (see Figure 6.1 in The Power of TAFE, a COVID Story), the one I’d like to draw attention to is ‘improved and centralised resources’.

Image source: https://tda.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2020-12-06-The-Power-Of-TAFE-A-COVID-Story.pdf

Beyond collaboration, education networks need a shared and easily accessible pool of knowledge and tools in order to achieve excellence, faster paced innovations, financial sustainability and business continuity.

Over the years, I have witnessed this culture of sharing among a broader group of open source software users – universities, colleges, government, health, non-for profit and commercial entities – developing and sharing tools that result in their ongoing improvement and resilience in cost effective ways.

The current challenges and opportunities for Australian TAFEs.

The value of TAFEs in Australia is continuing to be recognised, with many Fee-Free TAFE courses introduced by the Labor Government in early 2023. The Fee-Free TAFE programs exceeded the expectations in terms of enrollment numbers. Completion rates have also been steady, with 110,000 Australians ‘skilled up’ between January 2023 and September 2024.

These positive outcomes, however, do come with cost.

The 2024 ‘State of our TAFE’ report by the Australian Education Union (AEU) revealed that TAFE teachers faced high working hours and workloads to the point of being ‘unmanageable’.

In the survey conducted by AEU, respondents were asked to to rank top five contributing factors to their current workload. These included:

Increased administrative burden
Widening duties within one’s area of responsibility
Reductions in staff
Impacts of reorganisation and restructuring
Increased student numbers

“The increased intensity of work and the burden of additional tasks has real and substantial impacts on the ability of TAFE teachers to continually develop their teaching practice, maintain their industry currency, to update and develop curriculum and to provide sufficient time for students to learn and practice skills.” (Source)

In the ‘State of our TAFEs Victoria’ 2024 report’, 78.7% of respondents said there were teacher shortages. Over 50% stated ‘excessive workloads’ as the main reason for this.

If TAFEs will continue to face excessive workloads for staff, with bigger classrooms, greater administrative burdens, difficulty to retain staff and everything in-between, the economic prosperity potential of Australian TAFEs can be well outweighed by all these issues.

In 2024, the Victorian TAFE Network released a Statement of Priorities focusing on four key areas – Skills, Students, Sustainability and Staff – and emphasising the need for increasing internal collaboration, integration and transparency within their Network.

I see a lot of sense in this.

Source: https://djsir.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/2293186/TAFE-Network-Statement-of-Priorities-2024.pdf

Taking the bigger step towards financial sustainability.

If collaboration is the first step to achieving progress in more efficient ways, then standardisation is the next and the bigger step towards achieving that goal. Network and government funded orgainsations are perfect candidates for this.

Now, let’s talk about technology.

I believe that standardising technologies will reduce the burden on the Australian TAFE Network. With the use of smart, scalable and standard core technologies across the Network, TAFEs can unlock significant cost savings and operational benefits that will result in long term financial sustainability.

Just some of the benefits of standardising TAFEs tech stack will be:

Reduced duplication and licensing costs
Streamlined support and maintenance
Greater data consistency and insights
Centralised course content learning assets i.e. not re-inventing the wheel
Enhanced staff training and mobility
Improved procurement and cost efficiency via economies of scale

Getting the balance right between customisation and standardisation.

A tech stack can and should be customised to individual organisations. The tricky part is getting the balance right between customisation and standardisation. In an ideal situation you would both, meet individual entity needs and achieve economy of scale efficiencies through shareable resources. All while still delivering a solution that provides the flexibility that different business units might need. Open source (OS) projects and tools can help you achieve that.

Double the benefit of OSS for TAFEs.

For a network organisation like TAFEs, the benefits of using OSS and (at least some) standard applications would be two fold – share ideas, resources and tools within (and specific to) the Network, as well as benefit from the ongoing and broader OS community innovations. It’s quite a unique position to be in and is a solid solution to improving systems, workflows and processes at scale.

Scalability, flexibility and continuity winner.

Proprietary providers will tell you how important scalability, integration options and flexibility are in Learning, Content and Student Management Software (LMS, CMS and SMS). However, you will always be tied to their product roadmaps. Often the talk of client ability to influence the upcoming feature set in proprietary IT applications are unfortunately just “lip service.” No proprietary provider can match the flexibility of OSS.

Proprietary providers will also tell you that you need to chose reputable software providers that have been in business for many years. Again, no proprietary provider is 100% secure when it comes to their business continuity. Edmodo is a classic example – one of the oldest and most widely used online learning platforms shut down permanently in September 2022. Edmodo had 100 million users worldwide and existed since 2008. Who would have thought?

Always relying on a commercial success or decisions of a single vendor is a risky business.

In that sense, open source software (OSS) offers a powerful, safe and sustainable alternative to proprietary technologies. It reduces licensing costs, increases flexibility, and supports strategic independence, resulting in long-term efficiencies. More importantly, it is backed by lifetime community support and innovations.

In short, an OSS ecosystem has no shelf life.

By adopting OSS strategically, TAFEs can redirect their budgets from vendor lock-ins toward innovation, student outcomes, and future-readiness.

Platforms like Moodle, BigBlueButton, Linux, and Nextcloud have proven success in the education industry and are trusted by universities and TAFEs worldwide.

These platforms integrate well, are WCAG-compliant, and support secure online delivery of education at scale.

Adopting standard OSS tech stack would allow TAFEs to choose service providers for some things, and manage some things in-house. There will be reliance on a single vendor’s plans or pricing.

Customisation is still possible, without loosing the benefits of collaboration and economies of scale. OSS can be tailored to meet the unique needs of individual vocational education providers —supporting compliance, accessibility, and learner engagement. Innovations or new features that any organisation needs to an OSS tool set can be assessed based on their cost and necessity.

Agility is another important benefit of OSS – TAFEs can collaborate with each other or with other OSS users, including international education bodies, to co-develop solutions – reducing duplication of effort, and without waiting for proprietary vendor development cycles. And, of course, when organisations push their changes “upstream” (into the freely available code base) then all other users benefit from the functionality delivered.

OSS is a strategic enabler.

I am finding it difficult to find drawbacks in having a pool of software that can easily be shared among various government funded institutions. The UK’s Open Government Initiative, for example, demonstrated that open source adoption saved costs, increased digital skills, and contributed £13.59 billion to the economy; and the EU reports a 1:4 cost-benefit ratio for open source innovation.

While OSS is favoured by many Government organisations in Australia, I am not sure how actively it is promoted to their affiliates. The benefits mentioned above – transparency, continuity, cost effectiveness and faster paced innovations – are obvious reasons why Governments should encourage the use of OSS. It will positively reflect on both, the progress and the budget.

Open source software is really a strategic enabler. For TAFEs, OSS tech stack would support financial sustainability through reduced operating costs, improved flexibility, and better alignment with the sector’s collaborative, community-oriented values.

By adopting and contributing to open source solutions, TAFEs can future-proof their technology strategy and reinvest their resources in core educational outcomes. And they can take that leverage to the next level if they, at least to some level, standardise the stack of OS tools they use to deliver education across the entire network. I am not sure there is a better strategy to streamline their workflows and processes at scale.

As with transformation necessitated by the COVID Pandemic, collaboration, and where possible standardisation, will help the Australian TAFE network get through current and future changes even more efficiently; while resilient, community backed, technology suite, will serve as a backbone for the Network’s long term sustainable growth.

Andrew has over 20 years experience in OS development and EdTech. He has worked on a range of project and mobile applications at Catalyst IT since 2005 and have spearheaded the global Catalyst expansion by launching the Australia division in 2008 and then Catalyst IT Canada in 2020. As the CEO of Catalyst IT Canada and Australia, Andrew leads his team to deliver bespoke, multi-region online learning and CMS solutions for enterprise level organisations. Catalyst IT are trusted by various reputable organisations within the higher education, government, health and commercial sectors.

This article was originally published on Andrew’s LinkedIn Page.

Further reading:

https://vdc.edu.au/vdc-news/the-value-and-state-of-tafe

https://tda.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2020-12-06-The-Power-Of-TAFE-A-COVID- Story.pdf

https://www.vic.gov.au/2025-victorian-training-awards-nomination-guide/message-ceo-office-tafe-coordination-and-delivery

https://djsir.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/2293186/TAFE-Network-Statement-of-Priorities-2024.pdf

https://djsir.vic.gov.au/what-we-do/skills-and-tafe

https://www.dewr.gov.au/download/15781/national-tafe-network/35148/national-tafe-network/pdf

https://treasury.gov.au/sites/default/files/2023-10/p2023-447996-working-future.pdf

https://futurework.org.au/report/an-investment-in-productivity-and-inclusion/

https://futurework.org.au/post/tafe-system-supports-92-5-billion-in-annual-economic-benefits/

https://www.aeuvic.asn.au/sites/default/files/2024-06/State%20Of%20Our%20TAFEs%20Victoria%20Report%20June%202024_0.pdf