Moodle tackles e-learning muddle

Last year saw the meteoric rise of an open-source e-learning environment called Moodle. A rise so swift in fact that, despite being almost unheard of five years ago, it is now the system of choice for 56 percent of all further-education institutions in the UK, according to a survey released last year by the Open Source Software Advisory Service.

An e-learning environment is basically an interface that allows teachers and educators to manage disparate teaching applications and resources to create online courses. Hundreds of e-learning resources exist, so the ability to have a common entry point into at least some of them is a vital but relatively new area. Up to now, most of the approaches have been proprietary but, given academia's natural affinity with open source, it was only a matter of time before a community-based system emerged.

There are currently more than 20,200 registered Moodle installations worldwide, which serve the requirements of about 8.3 million users in 169 countries. But as Mark Aberdour, a technical producer at e-learning consultancy and content provider Epic, points out: "It's an open-source thing that's risen from the grass roots rather than being introduced from the top down. No-one's really gone out and sold it to educational establishments. People have just heard about it by word of mouth, used it initially in small-scale ways and seen its value, so it's penetrated into organisations in a slightly different way from normal."

The Open University chose to go with Moodle a year or so ago and that was without reference to cost — just functionality, although it was cheaper than commercial systems

Steven Rayson, managing partner, Kineo

Moodle, which stands for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, is the brainchild of Martin Dougiamas, founder, lead developer and managing director of services company, Moodle Pty Ltd.

In Steve Hargadon's webcast, Dougiamas indicates that he "began development in the 1990s out of frustration with WebCT", a commercial virtual-learning environment, now owned by rival Blackboard, that he was trying to install in Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.

His irritation with being unable to access source code to help him fix problems was one spur, while another was cost. In his opinion, software should be free as long as a way can be found to pay for development. "The thing about electronic data and software is that production costs are zero after you've produced your first working copy", which to Dougiamas means that to "charge a lot of money for a stream of bits seems ridiculous".

Translated into a Moodle context, this means that, in addition to the wider open-source community contributing development work for free, contract programmers are also given the option to get involved in paid projects. They choose from a list of modules and features that customers are prepared to pay for, but which will be merged back into future versions of the system, and agree a fee and deadline for completion with Dougiamas upfront.

For the first job payment is sent when the work is done, but with subsequent projects 50 percent is paid in advance and the rest on completion. Dougiamas also employs a handful of developers and a couple of operations staff, whose salaries are funded by users who choose to pay into a specially set up Moodle Trust.

The Moodle system itself, meanwhile, is written in PHP and its underlying structure reflects the work that Dougiamas undertook during his Masters degree and subsequent PhD in education, which he "synthesised into the idea of social constructivism" or learning by doing.

This means that the system is very collaborative in nature and geared for high levels of interaction between tutors and students, providing functionality such as forums and discussion threads, instant messaging-based chatrooms and support for wikis and blogs. Like most systems of its ilk, it does not include content, although authoring tools such as Articulate Presenter are available on the market for about £600.

Steven Rayson, managing partner at Kineo, an e-learning consultancy and services provider, says: "Moodle's functionality is very rich, more so than most other systems on the market. The Open University chose to go with it a year or so ago and that was without reference to cost — just functionality, although it was cheaper than commercial systems. Capita has also started to use it and once you see organisations like them moving in, it starts to generate more confidence."

The Open University invested £5m in the project, which involved using Moodle as the foundation of its new online student learning environment. The initiative commenced in November 2005, the first version of the system was released in May 2006, and it is expected to be fully operational for use by 180,000 students from February 2007.

While it was this project that really made people sit up and take notice of Moodle, the system is still used primarily in the further-education space as a course-management system — although it is now vying with commercial leader Blackboard for dominance of the sector.

However, says Aberdour: "It's not that big in primary or secondary schools yet because Becta, the government agency that outlines procurement processes, has not really engaged in open source as yet, but that is starting to change."

Aberdour does indicate that Epic has won a couple of public-sector contracts elsewhere, and he believes that interest in Moodle is growing in this market, especially as the government has advised public authorities to at least...