Contents
Introduction
As I am a teacher at heart, I would like to start by stating my learning objectives for this presentation. I would be very pleased if I could make it so that you:
- are awed by Moodle's functionality (even though the technology is simple),
- want to try out Moodle for building a community around an event or subject as soon as possible,
- will consider using an open source VLE/LMS in your business,
- realise that no other e-Learning products have a shorter time to market,
- talk about Moodle at your home and at your work,
- experiment with Moodle as a rapid development environment for authoring e-Learning content and...
- take note that it is possible to do a presentation without using slides.
Installing Moodle
During this presentation I will install Moodle from scratch and will create a course about the Holland Open Software conference. This is a feasible enterprise for a talk of 30 minutes.
Basically, you will have to take the following steps:
- Have a PHP enabled webserver ready with a database connected to it (e.g. a LAMP-stack as can be installed in fifteen minutes with the Ubuntu Server Edition; I am cheating as my laptop already has that)
- Download the latest stable release from Moodle (online or through CVS; another cheat: did it!)
- Unpack in a web directory and run the installer (this is where we start today)
- Create an admin user
- Fill in some information about the front page
Now we can create a course. I will create one that is about the Holland Open. Unique about Moodle is the fact that the courses are not functionally organised (e.g. a button for communication where you do the communicating and a button for assignments where you can find all the assignments). Instead a course is organised around topics or weeks. Every topic/week can have multiple resources and activities added to it. We will create a course with two topics: Holland and the Holland Open. We will link to some files, create a forum, poll our visitors, start a Wiki and give out an assignment.
Moodle: A Short History
Moodle was created by Martin Dougiamas, whose doctoral PhD research was titled: The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry. He was a WebCT administrator and was fed up with the way how things worked. He decided to create something new based around sound pedagogical principles.
Moodle 1.0 came out in August 2002. Martin D. made the conscious decision to use the popular scripting language PHP as he wanted to collaborate with as many other developers as he could find (originally he wanted to use Zope). Internationalisation was built in from the outset: an online language editor was provided and Moodle is now translated into more than 75 languages.
The growth of Moodle has been big:
It used to be a product that was made by one man with a vision. Now it has developed into a product that has multiple fulltime developers from different institutions working on it. MoodleTM is a trademarked brand and only the official partners in the partner network are allowed to say that they deliver Moodle services.
Examples of Moodle (ab)use
Because of the lack of licensing costs and because of the simple requirements for starting a site, Moodle is used in all imaginable settings. The spectrum runs from institutions with thousands of students to home schooling or small (one person) businesses. I would like to give you a couple of examples:
- Large scale installations The Moodle installation with the most courses is the Brno University of Technology (link • pic). They have more than 19.000 courses with more than 40.000 users. The largest installations in terms of users is moodle.org itself, it has more than 240.000 registered users. There are 51 sites with more than 20.000 users. Another exciting big implementation is the Open University in the United Kingdom (link 1 • link 2 • pic). What I find interesting is their philosophy of open content: all their materials are freely available online.
- Conferences and on the fly communities It is very easy to use Moodle as an online community for a conference. A good recent example of this is the very inspiring Future of Education conference (link • pic 1 • pic 2). This conference only exists online and thus has some highly motivated visitors (content is more important than networking) from many places:
They have extensively used forums to have pre-conference discussions and to keep the discussion alive after the different speakers have spoken.
- Small niche learning sites Many people use Moodle as a small site for learning about a particular subject. One of my favorites is Glyphdoctors (link • pic), where you can study Egyptology online (and for a fee). Other examples are language schools, churches, Internet research and Guidance Consulting and Life Workouts.
- Platform for webbased training Many companies use Moodle as a platform for delivering their SCORM based training to their employees. ABN Amro uses Moodle to train their call center workers:
- Special needs Moodle is very adaptable, standards oriented (it currently validates as XHTML strict) and conforms to all major accessibility standards. It is often used in settings where students have special needs. Some examples are: Beau411 for autistic students (Dutch) and a Moodle site for a school for visually impaired and blind people (German).
Moodle's Future
Moodle's roadmap is a very public document that shows the direction that Moodle will take in the next couple of months/years. I think the following points are the most important (most of these will be ready in the very near future):
- Development of APIs for events, grades, file repositories, portfolios and student information
- Creation of im- and export facilities for Learning Design
- Development of conditional activities, sequencing and SCORM 2004
- Embedding VoiceXML support in the core
More Information
The following sites and resources provice more information about Moodle:
- Moodle.org, the home of the Moodle community.
- Statistics, about Moodle and its use.
- Sites, an overview of all registered Moodle installations.
- Buzz, a listing a places where Moodle has been in the news.
- Docs, the central place for all Moodle documentation.
- Ned-Moove, the Nederlandstalige Moodle Vereniging (Dutch Moodle Group).
I hope you have enjoyed this presentation. If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me or check out the Stoas website. This presentation is available at http://www.hansdezwart.info/hosc2007 or as a downloadable ZIP-file (1.1 MB).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. - Special needs Moodle is very adaptable, standards oriented (it currently validates as XHTML strict) and conforms to all major accessibility standards. It is often used in settings where students have special needs. Some examples are: Beau411 for autistic students (Dutch) and a Moodle site for a school for visually impaired and blind people (German).