Fresh back from the German Moodlemoot conference held in Heidelberg. This year’s conference provided about 400 people with the opportunity to network and exchange their experiences of using Moodle. Again, the conference seemed to focus on institutional users like schools and universities where thousands of participants are enrolled in Moodle courses; still, there were enough workshops and seminars on topics relevant to Moodle best practice, interface design and implementation in corporate environments to make it worthwhile to non-academics like myself.

 

I wonder if this academic slant could represent a danger to Moodle. It is a common strategy to multiply the acceptance of software by using educational institutions to expose users to it initially. I use the Moodle LMS on a comparatively small scale in corporate environments to create and optimize courses for all levels of Business English, management training and intercultural skills training. When I convert classic, face to face trainers to Moodle facilitators in many of my blended learning workshops, these people go on to also create comparatively small scale Moodle environments. However, many of these facilitators produce extremely high quality content in their Moodles and develop sophisticated blended learning methodologies using Moodle as one component. Sometimes it appears to me that the concentration is on getting as many Moodles installed in as many schools as possible just for the sake of having them there. Many of these are used as sort of data dumps where students are expected to simply access documents from. This is by no means the best way to employ Moodle, yet there are so many sites like this.  Perhaps more energy should be devoted to improving the interactivity and quality of the courses which have been set up in these academic settings. There is nothing like reading hundreds of pages of text online….

The highlight, for me, was personally meeting the founder of the platform, Martin Dougiamas, who had flown from Australia to speak there. Martin is an extremely personable guy who exudes lots of good karma and casually throws out one or two great ideas over a beer. What else would you expect from someone who developed something like Moodle? The whole atmosphere was so positive and, well, collaborative.

Martin presented an outline of the further development of a plan that envisions facilitators/content creators sharing their learning objects with peers through a Moodle repository. The concept, if I understand it correctly, could be quite radical and liberating – and represent a major threat to big media and conventional publishing. Moodle is already my preferred LMS; a content repository could make it even more useful. Quality content circulating freely is already reality, but having an easy to use  repository would make it easier to organize, share and evaluate content modules.

 

Martin Dougiamas in Heidelberg 2008

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