In the current unprecedented global economic downturn, a community associated with a  learning management system ( LMS) called Moodle for global educators  is growing at an  exponential  rate. It is becoming extremely popular partially more so in this economy, but most likely because of its open source nature with high performance/cost ratio. The number of moodle sites has been growing following the Moore’s law since 2003, and the total known moodle sites (most of them are created by academic or corporate educators) have reached 60000 in March 2009 (http://moodle.org/stats/). So far, after a few weeks of climbing up my learning curve on how to get it to work, I have enjoyed Moodle’s overall functionality and its hard-to-break user friendly interface (UI).  I’ve installed it a few times on both Windows and Linux platforms, and integrated it with Apache, MySQL database after a few days’ cram sessions on PHP programming and worked with administration functions as well as adding modules to make it meet the expectation of our organization.  It is a very powerful and robustness platform that I haven’t seen for years with very few hassle along the way.

Moodle stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. In the technical terms, Moodle is Open Source Learning Management System (LMS) which enables learning professionals (educators) to create engaging online learning courses. Moodle is the brainchild of Martin Dougiamas, who designed the program while working on his Ph.D. at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. He developed it as an Open Source application for his dissertation using a social constructivist’s approach to learning. As a result, Moodle is developed with features which facilitate this approach to education, particularly with interactive community components such as blog, forum, survey, and virtual conference. Dougiamas programmed Moodle in PHP, a programming (or scripting) language that can create web pages based on user input and data-based information. Moodle’s Philosophy of learning  is its focuses on collaboration, activities and critical reflection. This social-constructive approach involves a strong community of learning orientation rather than simple online computting courses and exercises. In general, a constructive amount of connected activities within a learning community is a very powerful stimulant for learning, not only bringing people closer together but promoting synergy among educators and learners.

In today’s internet connected world, virtually every educational institution or corporation, one way or another, has by now adopted a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or CMS (Course Management System) for use either as an aid to its traditional courses (often called a “integrated” or “hybrid” course system), or as a tool for its distance or off-campus education program via some commercial CMS, of which are expensive to license and which are rather rigid in the ways that they can be used. Moodle is different, rather than just publishing , assessing and reporting the information educator think learners need to know, it  create a platform on which each participant in a course, no matter if he or she is an educator or learner, can switch role in between. Your job as an educator can change from being originator of knowledge to being an influencer and role model of class culture, connecting with learners in a personal way that addresses their own learning needs, and promoting and facilating discussions and interactive activities in a way that collectively leads students towards the learning goals of the class achieving multi-threaded knowledge transfer.

Moodle has a very active community cross over 200 countries with 670k member. With a user base of this size situated around the world, it is common for moodle user to receive help within a matter of hours from different countries, some time with different language, regardless of the local time of day. Moodle community members not only give help, but have also continue to add new module or plugins codes to help a user to modify a current feature or create a new one. Now let us take a closer look at some of the top key features, blocks and modules of Moodle which are of the interest of academic and software developer training community.

• Interface languages: when a user logs on, there is a drop down menu from which he can select an interface language. Once set, that language choice remains unless another language is selected. These language modules have all been created by volunteers.
• Multiple material type support: Moodle platform is well positioned to host different learning materials such as animation, case study, drill and practice, lecture/presentation, quiz/test, video, live chat, survey, simulation and virtual conference etc. All are materailized by  Assignment Module, Chat Module, Choice Module, Forum Module, Journal Module, Poll, Quiz Module, Resource Module, Survey Module and Workshop Module. Embedded Shockwave Flash (.swf) files.  
• WYSIWYG HTML editor: It is the embedded tool in Moodle for users to edit text entry areas like resources, forum postings and journal entries. Copies of forum posts, teacher feedback etc can be mailed in HTML or plain text, and electronic assignment submissions. Instructors have various choices for course formats such as by week, by topic or a discussion-focused social format. 
• Activity Report: It is the full logging and tracking report for each student with graphs and module details (Access/Number of time read) as well as details of each student involvement like postings and journal entries.The course activity in Moodle includes Forums, Journals, Quizzes, Resources, Choices, Surveys, Assignments, Chats, and Workshops as well as virtual areas for group work. Instructor can easily get full reports of the activities of individual students, or of all students for a specific activity.
• The quiz-making function:  Self-assessment quizzes and online testing.  Quiz types such as: Multiple choice, True/False, Numerical, Matching, Description, and Cloze. A wide range of options allows you to randomize the questions and multiple-choice items, specify a time frame for availability, choose whether the students receive feedback or not, decide if they are allowed to view the correct answers, and determine how many times they may take the quiz and how it is to be scored.
• Modular design: Each functional feature of Moodle can be regarded as a module. Moodle is built in a very modular fashion. New functions can be created and activated merely by dropping them into the site’s directory where all of the plug-in modules are stored. There are site management, user management and course management for different users with different access.

Entering “Moodle”, an open-source platform, which is not only free but also highly adaptable for computer science education, universities and corporation education organization are quickly discovering that they can spend far less on down payment by implementing Moodle, and then  use some of the savings to tailor it to work precisely the way it is needed for a tight fit. And evidence have shown that moodle ( LMS) is no longer a tool used by low budget on-line or distance learning institutions. In stead, more and more universities wih PhD and MS curriculum  and professional training organization have finished their transition of traditional instructor lead class into moodle based dynamic online class, integrated with community ingredients,  such as California Tech Computer Science Curriculum, Virginia Tech Computer Science Curriculum , Oregon Inst. of Tech. Curriculum for Computer Science and Tech and International conference such as Super Computing Education moodle which is  sponsored by  ACM and IEEE. At the same time, more universities have been systematically evaluating and piloting Moodle as the online learning management system. For example, at University of North Carolina at Charlotte (http://www.lmseval.uncc.edu/ ),  In 2008,  10 faculty participated the pilot and taught classes based on Moodle, and created a focus group to discuss their Moodle experiences, and in the following term in earlier 2009, the pilot extended to 18 new faculty members selected based on a variety of criteria, including college representation, course types, experienced vs. new users, fully online vs. hybrid, and face to face courses  and concluded that moodle offers advantages include ease of use and mastery, minimal support, collaboration with the open source community, flexibility, and adaptability to the needs of faculty and students.

On technical side, Moodle can run on virtually any machine, Windows, Macintosh  or Linux, as long as the followings are installed: 1) an Apache web server, 2) the page generation freeware, PHP, and 3) a database application, usually, but not limited to MySQL.  All are open source. Applications exist for all platforms and are listed under “Installing Apache, MySQL and PHP” at http://moodle.org/doc/. Some basic fact about moodle is listed below:

It is not yet to know how long Moodle can keep its exponential growth. For sure, it will help academic or corporate educators connect with learners, but in the larger scope, perhaps it will connect and optimize the fragmented knowledge and resource in different institutions, and eventually make the knowledge transfer process in an orchestrated and connected way, especially in the United States, where people expect more from universities and employer, while at the same time the available tax dollars are dropping.

I am a Moodler since 2009 and building a Moodle platform for Intel academic community. Currently, I am actively working on every details of the project. If you have any suggestion or comments that you want to share with the reader of this blog, you can add them here. I would also love to hear from you if you choose to email me at tao.b.wang@intel.com.