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INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN DOUGIAMAS
Martin Dougiamas
is the 35-year-old lead developer of Moodle, He
was formerly webmaster and system administrator
for a WebCT installation at Curtin University of
Technology located in Perth, Australia. Along
with his background in computer science, he
earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in
education. At the moodle.org website he writes
that he is "committed to continuing my work on
Moodle and on keeping it open and free. I have a
deeply-held belief in the importance of
unrestricted education and empowered teaching,
and Moodle is the main way I can contribute to
the realisation of these ideals."
Below are
excerpts from a recent e-mail interview with
Dougiamas conducted by Educational Pathways
Editor and Publisher George Lorenzo.
EdPath: If I am a
current provider of online learning courses
looking for an alternative to the commercial CMS
products, what should I know about Moodle and
the conversion process I will need to go through
in order to be up and running as smoothly and
quickly as possible?
Dougiamas:
Well, because systems can vary a lot, there is
no simple import/export answer to this. We do
have a lot of tools for converting various data
into forms Moodle can use, and we also support
some standards like SCORM that can allow some
content to be moved across without changing it.
Moodle in general is very good at using content
in just about any format you can think of.
However, in a
conversion process what you need are teachers
who are committed to improving the quality of
the online courses and able to try a fresh
approach. Moodle as a whole is a unique and
expanding learning environment with particular
emphasis on activities and flexibility. I would
advise taking the opportunity of a migration to
rework courses from the ground up to take
advantage of these features.
EdPath:
We know
you could be considered the wrong person to ask
this question, but why would anyone purchase a
commercial CMS, when they can use Moodle for
free?
Dougiamas:
I suppose one reason is they might not have
technical staff able to maintain an open source
system (which is really not that hard) but even
this is not an issue, since you can outsource
your hosting with any one of many Moodle
Partners (see
http://moodle.com/hosting).
With this solution the platform is taken care of
and you can get on with education. (Editor’s
note: Dougimas provides fee-based hosting and
support services for Moodle. For more
information, see
http://martin.moodle.com.)
To take this a
little further, note that Moodle is not only
free (as in beer) but free (as in speech). As an
open source product, you are allowed (in fact
encouraged!) to take the software and bend it or
extend it to your needs. Spend some of the
licensing fees you would have spent on a
commercial CMS and create a new job for a
technical administrator or programmer to support
and customize open source software in your
institution. The skills required are quite
generic now. As your link to the wide Moodle
development community, this person will provide
real support in your institution light years
beyond what you could ever get from a big
software company.
Instead of
viewing Moodle as completely free, it should
sometimes be viewed as a better rearrangement of
resources.
EdPath:
What do I need to know about setting up Moodle
to hold online courses I am producing with other
software products?
Dougiamas:
If you have an existing content management
system or a document management system with a
web interface, then Moodle can easily use that
to allow this content to appear in your courses.
Really such stuff should be packaged in standard
formats like SCORM, which Moodle also natively
supports. SCORM packages can be run from inside
Moodle without
modification. |
