In conjunction with Tairawhiti Polytechnic Gisborne, AUT will be hosting the project and taking it on for further development.

'One of the big target audiences we will be looking at, apart from all the academic staff in New Zealand, is to use eXe as an engine for creating virtual universities for countries that don't have the finance or the population to support a traditional university,' says Higgins.

Higgins has written guidelines for e-learning using a combination of strategies from distance learning and guidelines for general teaching as a background. Higgins and his team put it all online and made the guidelines interactive, allowing people to add new research and update information.

'So, it's not a fixed object, gathering dust on a shelf,' he says.

The guidelines have been taken up by a number of institutions in New Zealand and have grown into a set of national guidelines. When Higgins attended a meeting in Australia recently, there was huge interest in our national e-learning guidelines, which the Australians are now looking at copying.