Section 1.2. What Makes Moodle Special?

1.2. What Makes Moodle Special?

Part of my day job is to administer a commercial CMS for a large university. I've been researching CMSs for a few years now, and I've become a huge fan of Moodle because it is open source, built on a sound educational philosophy, and has a huge community that supports and develops it. It can compete with the big commercial systems in terms of feature set and is easy to extend. Let's take a closer look at some of these advantages and why they are important to you and your institution.

1.2.1. Free and Open Source

The phrase "open source" has become a loaded term in some circles. For those who are outside of the techie culture, it's hard to understand what a weird and powerful idea this has become, and how it has forever changed the world of software development. The idea itself is simple; open-source simply means that users have access to the source code of the software. You can look under the hood, see how it works, tinker with it, or use parts of it in your own product.

So why is this important? For one, open source software is aligned with the academic community's values of freedom, peer review, and knowledge sharing. Just as anyone can download and use Moodle for free, users can also write new features, fix bugs, improve performance, or simply learn from looking at how other people solved a problem.

Secondly, unlike expensive proprietary CMSs that require hefty maintenance contracts, Moodle costs nothing to download and you can install it on as many servers as you want. No one can take it away from you, increase the license cost, or make you pay for upgrades. No one can force you to upgrade, adopt features you don't want, or tell you how many users you can have. They can't take the source code back from users, and if Martin decides to stop developing Moodle, there is a dedicated community of developers who will keep the project going.

1.2.2. Educational Philosophy

Martin's background in education led him to adopt social constructionism as a core theory behind Moodle. This is revolutionary, as most CMS systems have been built around tool sets, not pedagogy. I would call most commercial CMS systems tool-centered while Moodle is learning-centered.

Social constructionism is based on the idea that people learn best when they are engaged in a social process of constructing knowledge through the act of constructing an artifact for others. That's a packed sentence, so let's break it down a bit. The term "social process" indicates that learning is something we do in groups. From this point of view, learning is a process of negotiating meaning in a culture of shared artifacts and symbols. The process of negotiating meaning and utilizing shared artifacts is a process of constructing knowledge. We are not blank slates when we enter the learning process. We need to test new learning against our old beliefs and incorporate it into our existing knowledge structures. Part of the process of testing and negotiating involves creating artifacts and symbols for others to interact with. We create artifacts and in turn negotiate with others the meaning of those artifacts in terms of a shared culture of understanding.

So how does that relate to Moodle? The first indication is in the interface. While tool-centric CMS systems give you a list of tools as the interface, Moodle builds the tools into an interface that makes the learning task central. You can organize your Moodle course by week, by topic, or by a social arrangement. Additionally, while other CMSs support a content model that encourages instructors to upload a lot of static content, Moodle focuses on tools for discussion and sharing artifacts. So the focus isn't on delivering information, it's on sharing ideas and engaging in the construction of knowledge.

Moodle's design philosophy makes this a uniquely teacher-friendly package that represents the first generation of educational tools that are truly useful.

1.2.3. Community

Moodle has a very large, active community of people who are using the system and developing new features and enhancements. You can access this community at http://www.moodle.org/ and enroll in the Using Moodle course. There you'll find people who are more than willing to help new users get up and running, troubleshoot, and effectively use Moodle. As of this writing, there are 4,000 people enrolled in the Moodle community and over 3,000 Moodle sites in 112 countries. The global community has also translated Moodle into 40 languages.

The Moodle community has been indispensable to the success of the system. With so many global users, there is always someone who can answer a question or give advice. At the same time, the Moodle developers and users work together to ensure quality, add new modules and features, and suggest new ideas for development. Martin and his core team are responsible for deciding what features are mature enough for official releases and where to go next. Because users are free to experiment, many people use and test new features, acting as a large quality control department.

These three advantages - open source, social constructivism, and community - make Moodle unique in the CMS space.