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Martin Dougiamas : The Man Behind the Open-source LMS Moodle

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Martin Dougiamas is the Australia based educator and computer scientist, who founded one of the world’s biggest learning management system. Dougiamas has always been a keen learner, and despite lack of facilities, he was able to fulfil his desire for learning. A voracious reader and a lover of speculative fiction, he is a believer of sharing knowledge. Brent Simpson described him as “one of the rare instances in Open Source software development, where the right person with the right personality appears at exactly the right time; Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software.”

Early Life

Dougiamas was born on 20 August 1969, in Perth, Australia. He spent most of his childhood in a deserted area in Western Australia, where, there was no facility for even basic education. He received his primary education at his home and studied from the material dropped from the aeroplane. He then joined the Kalgoorlie School of the Air, under distance education. As it was a distance learning school, he visited the school only a few times; sometimes for the school projects and a few times for the exams. He always missed being in a classroom with his classmates. At the age of ten, he became interested in wireless and internet technologies and studied books based on them.

Martin Dougiamas
Image Source: Flickr

After a few years, his family moved back to Perth, where Dougiamas joined West Balcatta Primary School and Balcatta Senior High School. He received a master’s degree and PhD from the Curtin University, Australia.

Career

At the age of 17, Dougiamas started working at Curtin University, where he taught the staff about the usage of various web applications. The internet and computers were the latest technologies that were emerging at that time, and he realized that it is not an easy task to teach people about those technologies and utilize them for teaching and learning.

The university installed the newly built learning management WebCT, one of the first learning management systems of that time, at its campus. Dougiamas was asked to improve its functionalities. But, his experience with the software was not a pleasant one, due to the restriction and software’s intellectual property rights.

Founding Moodle

Soon, Dougiamas joined the university as a student and started working on the development of a set of online tools for distance education, as the part of his PhD thesis, “The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry”. The tools he was developing for online education were soon adopted at a bigger level, and he had to eliminate them from his PhD thesis.

The first site developed on Moodle was of Peter Taylor from Curtin University, in 2001. By the end of the year, Moodle was available for downloads on CVS. In 2003, Moodle became a community-based software, with its first contributed module released on Moodle.org, a community arm for Moodle.com. People, across the world, were translating it in different languages and were developing themes for it.

In 2015, Moodle became the most used learning management system in the world, with 70,136 registered sites, in 222 territories worldwide, and in 2017, it had over 100 million registered users. Moodle Pty Ltd. HQ has over 45 employees, and it has its branches located in Australia, Spain, Canada, and the UK. The company is financed by a partners network that consists of over 80 certified companies around the world.

Personal Life

Currently, Dougiamas serves as the CEO of Moodle, Pty Ltd. He is the winner of Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award in the Education Enabler category (2008) and was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Vic – the Central University of Catalonia “for his contribution to open-source software through his leadership of the Moodle platform”, in 2016. He also received another honorary doctorate at the Université Catholique de Louvain, in 2018.

Growth of e-Learning Industry & Why Moodle is still the best LMS?

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E-learning is an electronic learning which involves delivering either part or a complete course using a computer in schools, universities  or delivering important technical and business training in companies. Earlier, e-learning growth was hindered by the thought that it would essentially inhibit the human element that some learners need, however with time there has been a variety of technological developments leading to many people embracing the use of smartphones, tablets and computers in classrooms and offices. The growth of interactive designs have made e-learning engaging and a good medium for course delivery. Moreover, most learning and business organizations have enhanced their e-learning through the partnership with course or training providers together with building their own technical team to ensure a smooth learning experience for their learners.

E-learning is widely used in many companies for employees’ effective and efficient training. Over the years, the use of e-learning in companies has increasingly grown. Companies have practically discovered that every money spent on online employee training increases the employee productivity and efficiency. In last decade E-learning has seen tremendous growth worldwide. According to a new survey, by 2020 the global market of corporate e-learning will be worth more than 31 billion US dollars. Recently, many traditional schools around the world have adopted eLearning.

The growth of e-learning has been effectively necessitated by its benefits to both the individual users and the organizations- Cost effectiveness,  24/7 learning that can be done anywhere without necessarily attending specific classrooms, tracking of course progress for learners and its discreet nature which allows each individual learner to learn at their own preferred pace.

The Moodle LMS and reasons why it is still relevant
Moodle Learning Managemnet System(LMS) can be defined as not only the world’s most popular but also the  most used LMS which was developed back in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas. The reason for its global popularity is the user-friendly nature of its e-learning platform. Moodle LMS is open source & free to download with full liberty to customize and develop further. Since its inception, Moodle LMS has strongly remained the educator’s relevant platform for providing online learning in more personal environment that easily boosts interaction and collaboration-

  • Moodle is free open source technology that enables its users to personally choose their own perfect LMS schedule so as to achieve their organizational goals
  • Its certification and gamification features and tools help many organizations to meet the increasingly common requirement of offering the course certification
  • The ability to centralize multiple course providers and systems, has always been the reason why Moodle has been persistently relevant and the best option to many organizations
  • Support for SCORM and third party plugins makes it obvious choice for educators and admins

Moodle features, customization and development options.
With the aim of organizations to working in specific and efficient ways, Moodle LMS has various customization and configuration features to cater to organizational needs and demands. It offers lot of freedom in custom development and design customization. As a Moodle admin you can build an amazing learning environment by adding a variety of your personal favorite plugins which can be either individually developed or from the community. You can also opt for Moodle development services offered by different Moodle experts.

Today’s Moodle is none less than any paid or custom LMSs being offered by different EdTech firms. Moodle have features that efficiently and effectively serve both the students and the administration. The open source learning management system offers excellent web support tools to ensure effective collaborative learning. Moodle has the ability to integrate with a good number of enterprise system to facilitate continuous integration flows.