Press room

The figures for Moodle are impressive. What, in your opinion, are the reasons behind its success?

There are several. One of them is that Moodle is free in both senses (freedom and no cost). People feel that if they use Moodle they are not locked in: they are able to change it and participate in the development, and that gives them a sort of confidence. They are not buying into a commercial product; they are buying into a community.

On the other hand, this freedom can make some potential users feel unprotected. Who can they complain to if something goes wrong?

Moodle has a support system. We have quite good community support with documentation, which is free. We also have commercial support for people who need to pick up the phone and call. There are 40 companies around the world that provide this service at reasonable rates. That is actually the model that makes Moodle itself work, because those companies put 10% of their earnings back into Moodle development, and that is what pays the core programmers to work on it. That is one thing. The other thing is that, because Moodle is free, the early adopters, all the ones who downloaded it, installed it on their laptop and started to use it, they are the ones driving it. So it is not usually the administrator on the top of the tree that is worried about accounting and accountability, it is usually the teachers themselves going “I need this for my classes and I am going to use it”. And then Moodle grows bit by bit from the ground up within an organization until eventually someone makes the decision.

So one of the keys of is that it is free, but you mentioned there were others as well.

Yes. Another is that Moodle has a strong pedagogical background. I started off with a degree in Computer Science and it was the dissatisfaction with working with the tools at my university that lead me to study a Masters and a PhD in education and then use this knowledge to create Moodle.

What did you feel was missing?

Interactivity, collaboration… Other systems are very much about the teacher always having full control and students having very little control. Moodle is more flexible. You can choose to give the control to students if you want to. And when you do, they get more engaged and the course is more collaborative. You have students learning from other students and you build communities. Learning is better when it is collaborative and that very much drives the development of Moodle.That takes me to the third thing that explains Moodle’s success: the fact that from the very beginning the community was part of my focus and I built it using Moodle itself. So we were living inside our own software. We were discussing Moodle inside Moodle, and Moodle was evolving around the community. Now we have about half a million people on Moodle.org discussing, suggesting, fixing and improving.

Are all these members programmers?

No, 35% of them are just teachers. They may not have installed the software; they are there to discuss using it. Of course, there are administrators, developers and researchers as well.

Moodle is open source. Why should a university choose an open-source platform instead a proprietary one?

I would not advise people to choose Moodle only. I am not selling Moodle, I am making Moodle. But I do promote open source. I think it has benefits in terms of security, stability and safety in your investment. If you buy a proprietary product and that company – in a hypothetical global recession perhaps – dies, what happens? The company is gone and the software is gone too! With open source, even if I suddenly turned into an evil genius that wanted to change things, the community would just go “no” and move on. There is too much momentum behind an open-source project, so no one person or company can change it. That is why people feel safe. It is actually the safest option.

What do you think about user-centered design? How can it be applied when the software is developed by programmers who are not very interested in user experience research?

You have hit right on the exact subject that is my personal wheelbarrow, if you like. Usability is a problem with developers in a community situation. They usually think the data structures and then create interfaces from that. The usability is kind of “Well, it works for me so it’s OK”.

So if the user gets lost, it’s the user’s problem.

Or it is a bug, so let’s fix the bug. We have to change our thinking on usability first. Designing interfaces with prototypes on paper, giving them to real people and saying “please try this”. The kind of interfaces we are becoming used to, like Windows, Macs, iPhones or the web, are getting simpler and better. Usability is improving and I have to really push the developers. We are building interface guidelines right now to improve that. There have been studies comparing Moodle with other Learning Management Systems and Moodle has come out on top in usability. However, I think there is a lot of improvement we can do. A lot.
That’s the focus of our next version. And due to the business model I mentioned I have resources now to hire usability consultants to help us.

What are the biggest challenges Moodle will have to face in the future?

Something I have identified as a problem is that, despite the pedagogical thinking that went into Moodle and the many tools we have in our one and a half million lines of code, teachers do not pick up on that pedagogy just by using it. The fact that tools are there does not mean I know how to use them. Teachers come from a background of not being used to online learning and so they immediately start with “Oh, I can put my Word documents online”. That is a first step but often, probably 80% of the time, they don’t go beyond that. So we need to encourage teachers to explore the richness that is possible with the internet beyond just transmitting some data.

For instance?

Collaborative discussions in forums, getting the students to create the content… Creating content is a learning activity. The students would actually feel much more involved and would remember the things they are working with much better if they were actually creating it, rather than just reading it. You can make courses a lot of fun with game-like experiences. You can have teams of people competing for something by creating something. Teachers don’t get that straight away so we are working in Moodle 2 on a system of linking this together. So, imagine you are a new teacher and you are faced with a course without any content. You would find a big button that says “Help me!”

OK, I’m feeling kind of lost so I press it.

You get asked a few questions and then you get taken to a place where there are teachers teaching the same subject, at the same level and in the same language. You start to be part of a community of people that are doing the same as you.

So you can learn from their experience.

They would say: “Hey, I tried this technique to teach physics and it was really good” or “Here is a very good website that I find really useful”. Being part of the community you would be constantly fed with useful ideas. We are also going to have a “course-copying button”. So any teacher can publish a course that worked well and which they are proud of. It will go to a database, a bit like iTunes, so you can browse the courses and read the comments on them. And if you like one, you can download it, use it, and change it. You will be part of a Moodle network. You will no longer be the only teacher in your institution doing that subject all alone. That is the vision. That is where we are going.