Moodlemoot Conference 2007

Moodle is an open source (free) Learning Content Management System that has gained an international reputation as a feature-rich and stable environment. There are now 18,880 sites in 168 countries using Moodle.

Moodle’s design is rooted in constructivism, an educational orientation that focuses on creating learning experiences rather than on just publishing and assessing the information that instructors think students need to know.

Founder and developer Martin Dougiamas discusses the trials and triumph of building Moodle

Martin Dougiamas is the founder and lead developer of Moodle. Moodle is an open source course management system that is used by thousands of institutions around the world. The software helps educators create effective online learning communities.

Aurora: What prompted you to first start work on Moodle? What were you doing at the time?

Martin Dougiamas: I was working at a University. I was using a commercial platform which was intended to do a similar sort of web-CT, working with all the academics around this campus that had 20,000 students, about 1200 staff or something. I was constantly finding that I was having problems with the software and even though I had this computer science background and probably could have fixed them, I was finding that I wasn’t able to. It was proprietary software and you’re not allowed to change it. So, you know, there I was on the phone talking to the company trying to get things to happen and it was very frustrating so I thought I probably could do it better. I realized I needed to know a bit more about education theory and I went and did a masters in education and then subsequently a PhD, left my job at the university and started developing it and everyday, you know, as soon as I woke up until I went to bed, just working on this thing for years and – made it happen. And it has.

Aurora: Perth is geographically isolated from other major centres. Has this isolation influenced Moodle development?

Martin Dougiamas: It probably has, Perth is a very isolated city. We have a lot of interest in the internet, online things, doing things remotely. I kind of sometimes envy people in the US and in North America and in Europe in that you’re always able to visit and go to conferences. Going to the next country for a conference is really cheap and easy. Going anywhere is hard for someone in Perth. So we’re forced to do things online. And that may help to be a bit more creative or put a bit more effort into the online space and what happens.

And for a project like this – for a long time I didn’t meet any other Moodle developers – like for years really. And then only once things start to get bigger and I had the opportunity to travel and start meeting these people, people who’d become friends over years and I’d meet them for the first time.

Martin Dougiamas: Many of them are here at this conference. It’s fantastic.

Aurora: When called on to attend conferences; your travel time can be extensive.

How long is a conference commute for you and what have been the health implications?

Martin Dougiamas: With hanging around in airports in between and all that, it’s 30 hours to get here. The longest trip I did was 37 hours to Puerto Rico where I had to go through the US and what not. So it’s quite a long time. Once I was traveling in economy in that particularly big leg from LA to Sydney, which is a good 14 hours, and I was trying to sleep – all scrunched up – and I did get DVT, deep vein thrombosis. I had clots in my legs, they were quite big ones, they loosened, went to my lungs and I had the full episode and spent five days in hospital on morphine. And you can die from these things so it was a bit of a wake up call. Particularly scary for my wife who was having a baby a few days later and so we were all in hospital at once. But it all worked out and so now I take best precautions, you know, if possible try and travel in business class so I can lie down and sleep, but also I take medicines and walk around and drink lots of water and not allowed to drink alcohol and etcetera, etcetera.

Aurora: Richard Wyles provided some examples of Moodle networks during his keynote address, which opens up whole other groups of adopters for Moodle. Project 3-5 years down the road, what changes or opportunities are in store for Moodle?

Martin Dougiamas: What will happen is that you’ll have this network, a world-wide network of Moodle sites and, as a Moodle user, you’ll be able to reach out to these other networks. And there’ll be different sorts of activities. Sometimes it’ll be students enrolling in courses on other sites. So you may take a course that has a teacher at one university and another teacher at a second university and so forth and you build a course from picking and choosing the best units from places. We use units in Australia, probably courses or classes or something — different terminology.

The other sorts of things you’re going to see are teachers collaborating. So, all the teachers in a particular subject domain will be able to find each other through the network and get together. All the English teachers will be discussing how to teach English using Moodle, sharing resources, sharing lesson plans, just hanging out in a community of their own peers. That’s the part that most excites me, these communities of practice based around subject areas.

Aurora: It’s almost like harnessing the power of the internet, creating its own little internet.

Martin Dougiamas: Absolutely, it’s part of this increasing trend to just getting out of our own little tiny space and realizing that we actually are doing the same thing over and over, all around the world, and wasting our collective energy.

Let’s Sloodle

Jeremy Kemp of San José State University and Paul Stacey of BCCAMPUS.ca chat about Second Life

Above: Jeremy Kemp immersed in San José State University's campus in Second Life
Photo: Courtesy of Blaise MacMullin

Aurora: What can you tell me about Sloodle?

Jeremy Kemp: Sloodle in a nutshell has two parts. One is the face that the Moodle users see which a way to bring Moodle content and people to experiment and do a Second Life environment. People from the Second Life perspective see this tool as a way to structure their teaching using the Moodle module framework. So there’s two perspectives, there’s two faces to this project and two communities that are blending.

Aurora: What was different about today’s session?

Paul Stacey: I’ll speak to that first just in terms of the setup. We’re here in Edmonton, the first Canadian Moodlemoot conference, which is a conference for people interested in Moodle. One of the interesting things about today’s session was Jeremy was live with us face to face here in Edmonton and speaking to an audience that was in the room. But we were also connected on the internet and using a webcasting tool called Elluminate to allow virtual participation from people around the world and Jeremy’s colleague, Grant Potter was inside that environment. So we’ve had virtual participants and face to face participants all hearing the same presentation and hearing Jeremy’s voice and hearing Grant’s voice. And then Jeremy was also in Second Life, the kind of virtual world flying around and we had two screens presenting both of these things and so it was a really rich, very rich and dynamic presentation that brought together face to face participants with remote participants.

Aurora: Some universities have already developed places in Second Life. How do you see that growing and what is the potential there?

Jeremy Kemp: I think we’re at a point where you’re going to see more mainstreaming. I think we’ve seen a lot of really extreme early adoption at this point for the last year to year and a half. And now we’re starting to see a little bit more mainstreaming of the concept. So people who may not be interested in multi-user virtual environments or gaming per se, will want to bring in their classes, bring in their campus in a little bit more organized and orderly way.

But to get back to your point about the setting, from my perspective as a presenter, this was a great experience because it really proves the world’s flat. You had four different modes of communication going here. You had me speaking to an audience, you had me using my mouse to walk around Second Life, you had my co-presenter in Elluminate talking to his cohort and you had people on the internet who just wanted to download the slides. So the world is flat when it comes to instruction in this setting and you guys really pulled off something amazing here.

Aurora: Anything else to add?

Paul Stacey: I think just to build on Jeremy’s comments about where the universities are going with this and where education is going with this – I think there’s been an initial early adoption. A lot of the early work has been recreating campuses, physical campuses, in these virtual worlds, but now where I see the shift happening is – How do we enable teaching and learning research within this virtual world? So we see a real shift away from just replicating your physical reality to now thinking about the pedagogy and the research activities that could be done in this world. And I think that’s where it starts to get real exciting. There’s some people who feel it’s kind of like a fad, but I think there are many people, especially those who have been in Second Life for a while that are finding the experience quite profound. And really raising, as I was saying to Jeremy earlier, raising all kinds of issues about personal identity, gender, sexuality, communication, interaction – big, big kind of philosophical questions almost. And I think some of the teaching and learning that we’ll see enabled through this environment will actually be around those kinds of issues and what your experience is like as you enter this virtual world and confront some of the aspects of dealing with … you know, your avatar, you create an avatar. Well you can create a male one or a female one, so which one are you going to create. And, of course, you can customize your appearance, so what are the issues around appearance. All these things, I think, are very deep and kind of provocative issues to tackle.

Paul Stacey and his Avatar

Photo: Courtesy of Blaise MacMullin

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