Case Study: Victoria University of Wellington advances open science education with GitLab

GitLab advances open science education at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington

Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Engineering and Computer Science needed a single, compliant platform to replace a fragmented mix of Blackboard, wikis, Google Docs, GitHub, Atlassian tools, and other systems. The lack of version control, issue tracking, and consistent workflows created unnecessary admin overhead and inconsistent learning experiences for students and faculty. GitLab, using GitLab Ultimate and self-managed on-premises hosting, was selected to meet the school’s project management, collaboration, and intellectual property requirements.

GitLab enabled the university to standardize software coursework and project management in one integrated workflow, with single sign-on, LDAP integration, issue boards, milestones, merge requests, and shared communication across students, lecturers, and supervisors. The results included stronger transparency, better collaboration, and more realistic engineering practices, plus measurable growth: student users increased by more than 483% since 2017, 34 GitLab-facilitated courses were added, and the school now supports over 2,000 groups, 8,000 projects, 30,000+ issues, and nearly 15,000 merge requests.

Victoria University of Wellington

Simon McCallum

Senior Lecturer