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.

Zorba the Greek

One of the lesser known museums in Heraklion is the Historical Museum of Crete. This has modern history of the island and most notably the library of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek. My only knowledge of this was from clips of the film based on the book, with Anthony Quinn dancing. An excellent multimedia display shows excerpts of films based on Kazantzakis work and relates this to the books and plays. The theme from the film "Zorbas" (Zorba's dance by Mikis Theodorakis), was performed at the wedding I attended at Palaios Panteleimonas.

The museum also has a pleasant cafe courtyard.

Knossos Palace

Deciding it was time to sort through the papers on my desk from a trip Malaysia, Turkey and Greece in May/June, I thought I would mention highlights. The first is Palace of Knossos (Κνωσός) in Crete. There is not arduous journey involved, as it is a suburban bus trip from the centre of Heraklion, the capital of Crete. As with many Greek arecological site, first impressions are not good, with the bus stopping at a collection of roadside (actually on the road) souvenir stands. This is a very busy tourist attraction so it is best to arrive at opening time.

Just inside the gate there is a tasteful new museum shop and restaurant (which didn't seem to be open). The site is controversial with reconstruction by Sir Arthur Evans, not in keeping with modern archaeological practice. But it gives a good idea what the buildings may have looked like. Near the entrance there are a series of circular holes cut into the rock several metres across, which look to me like a three stage water treatment system. I couldn't find any explanation of the structures, but Crete is a very dry place and so water management was a big thing at the palace. Several sections have been rebuilt in concrete and painted. Much of the contents found are at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum in the city. If you are short of time, visit the museum and skip the palace.

Little Train Tours of Aghios Niollaos Crete

The town of Aghios Niollaos on Crete has excellent "Little Train Tours", to see the sights. Cretan olive processing and Byzantine Church of Panagia Kera. In Australia I frown on these little imitation trains, with a diesel tractor disguised as a steam locomotive, pulling rubber tired trailers full of tourists. But being a tourist, I found it a very enjoyable way to get around.

It is impressive how the train, with three trailers, can wind its way around narrow streets. The train is about as long as an articulated bus, but can negotiate streets a bus could not. The train is limited to 25km/h, but this causes limited disruption in slow narrow streets. Perhaps an articulated bus the size of the train would be a viable form of public transport in crowded inner city streets.