Future of Moodle from Moodle Founder

Greetings from the Inspire Centre at University of Canberra where Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder is speaking at the MoodlePosium 2012. Martin started by attributing Moodle's success to it being free, flexible, personal and open. He suggested that 20% of the features were used by 80% of the people and we don't know about the learning outcomes from Moodle.

Martin suggested that Moodle was an attempt to re-engineering education, with 26 people at Moodle HQ. They look at the Moodle forums, bug tracker, commercial partners, conferences and social media. The first Moodle Research Conference was in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in 2012. The idea is to address education issues and what e-learning can do.

Moodel is made up of a core, Mods, and plugins. There are then interfaces to other software, preferably using standards. Moodle 2.4 will concentrate on performance, with a Moodle Universal Cache (MUC). There will be Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for icons (in theory this is a good idea, but I suggest in practice it will cause problems). Course formats will be redesigned to allow developers to modify the course look (by default they will look the same as before). Plugins will be upgradable via a web interface. Netspot has contributed new assignment features, such as groups and blind marking. The calandar can import iCal. Enrolment can synchronise cohorts to groups, so you can easily manage groups of students. The editor will have configurable buttons and plugins.

Martin suggested that timely feedback is essential to education.He suggests the feedback loop can be tighter by using better analytics and reporting. He emphasises this was not about automating the teacher, but giving them better tools to identify where students need help.

Martin described work for Moodle 2.5 and 2.6 with "Outcomes", which can be used for skills assessment, as is done in vocational education.  With this approach, the student needs to demonstrate they can meet each individual requirement, not just get an aggregate mark which passes the course. However, This "reductionist" approach is not as well regarded in higher education.

Moodle HQ is having another attempt at a Mobile App for Moodle. The previous attempt was an iPhone app which was then adapted for Android. The new approach uses HTML5 and JavaScript. This is a better approach, but I still doubt the value of having a separate Moodle application for mobile devices. It would be better to just have one interface which adapts for mobile devices. However, if the Mobile App works well it could be sued in place of the standard Moodle interface. It may also be a good way for educational institutions to provide a mobile web interface, rather than products such as Blackboard Mobile.

An area where I suggest Moodle needs to be improved is support for real time ("synchronous" in educational terms) and near real time learning. This would address Martin's wish for timely feedback. At present Moodle works in a store and forward mode (asynchronous). Where synchronous learning is required a separate software product is used, As a result the features of Moodle are not available for the synchronous session and many of the same Moodle features have to be duplicated in the other software. Making Moodle real time would be difficult, so I suggest making it near real time.

ps: The mix of features creates a technical issue for massively online open courses (MOOCs). The overhead of the LMS can cause problems with large numbers of users.I suggest this could be improved with some computer science techniques such as compiler optimisation and run time optimisation. With this the course materials would be automatically examined to see what features of the LMS software were actually going to be used and then those features not used would be left out. This would make the software run better.

Online Research Supervision using Moodle

These are some notes for an unconference session at  MoodlePosium 2012 on the topic "Online Research Supervision".

Moodle can be used for well structured course-work, but can it be used for supervising more fluid student projects and postgraduate research?

Tom Worthington has designed and run award winning on-line courses. He is now looking at how to apply this experience to supervising university student projects and postgraduate higher degrees, as a way to promote social inclusion.

A year ago I set out to look at "Learning On-line Tertiary Teaching for Research-Led Education" (August 20, 2011).

Some thoughts:

1. Teach all degree students to communicate, mentor and lead (ie: teach them to teach).
2. Blend vocational, higher education coursework and research, using online tools (Moodle and e-Portfolios).

See: "On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century".

Fifteen years of online education

Greetings from MoodlePosium 2012 in Canberra, where Dr. Shirley Reushle, Associate Director of the Australian Digital Futures Institute  is talking on fifteen years of online education at USQ. She made the point that students like active learning and interaction with other students, which is possible online.

Dr. Reushle broke out of the usual Powerpoint mode of conference presentations by running a live feedback session using Polleverywhere.  She asked the question "How is interacting and collaborating online different to collaborating in a face-to-face situation?" and invited the audience to respond by SMS or web. This worked remarkably well.She then showed a number of videos from here students discussing the topic, which was less useful.

Dr. Reushle was describing a very personal version of online education, which I have had the benefit of. However, my worry is that a more mechanical version of online education, designed to reduce costs and teach "facts". Australian educators may produce excellent online courses, only to find they are replaced by MOOCs from overseas, simply because these are cheaper.

There is a tendency to have an idealistic view of new communications technology changing education. Beat Generation authors Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs expressed a view on instructional technology in Chapter 7 of their 1945 novel "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks". One of the characters expresses the view that recordings of university lectures will be broadcast by radio 24 hours a day, allowing access for anyone. The narrator of the story expresses skepticism over this idea. That skepticism was well founded.

Australian National University Going Mobile

Greetings from MoodlePosium 2012 at the the University of Canberra where about 200 educators from the tertiary sector are looking at e-learning. The theme of this year's conference is how to how to enhance the use of the Moodle learning management system. The key speaker is, of course, Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle HQ.

As first speaker, Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at ANU announced that ANU will be introducing Blackboard Mobile, with applications designed for accessibility and well as use on mobile devices. Also Equella and Turnitin will be introduced. Also BlackBoard Collaborate is being evaluated.

I will be demonstrating my ANU on-line green ICT course materials which are designed for accessible and mobile use at 11:50am in "A Green Computing Professional Education Course Online with Moodle" (being just back from seeing how to do this in Indonesia).

Professor Nick Klomp, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), University of Canberra, then discussed the use of the Mahara e-Portfolio tool for students to plan what they wanted to achieve at university. He proposed working jointly with other universities to enhance the Mahara software, which is open source, to improve it use for universities. It happens I will be leading a discussion of this topic at at 4:20pm:

Moodle can be used for well structured course-work, but can it be used for supervising more fluid student projects and postgraduate research?

Tom Worthington has designed and run award winning on-line courses. He is now looking at how to apply this experience to supervising university student projects and postgraduate higher degrees, as a way to promote social inclusion. See: "On-line Professional Education For Australian Research-Intensive Universities in the Asian Century".

ps: The audience is made up mostly of staff from University of Canberra, ANU, CIT and USQ. For the last year I have been a student of ANU, USQ and CIT, as well as attending seminars at University of Canberra. So I feel very much at home.

MoodlePosium 2012 Canberra with Moodle Founder

The University of Canberra is hosting MoodlePosium 2012, 22 to 23 November 2012 in Canberra. The key speaker is, of course, Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and Lead Developer, Moodle HQ. I will be leading an open discussion on "Online Research Supervision" on the first day. On the second day I will give a short talk on "Green Computing Professional Education Course Online", being just back from seeing how to do this in Indonesia.