[Catalist] Moodle: a tale of tribalism and lost opportunities

[Leon Harris]

Hi to all. Around about 2000, I became aware of an open source LMS 
called Moodle, that was developed by Martin Dougiamas, who was then 
doing his PhD at Curtin University. It was already more capable that the 
then industry standard WebCT, which I was then employed to administer 
for Murdoch University. In addition, Moodle had a very open 
architecture, that was proven, scalable, secure and well understood by 
the IT community. These were exciting times: WA was acknowledged as the 
world centre of pedogogical excellence in computer-delivered 
instruction, and there was start of a hub of expertise, and the promise 
of many years of lucrative contracts and consulting. You would call it a 
centre of STEM excellence, if it happened now.

Moodle started to hit the classrooms. In the teaching workplace, which 
so often consists of workhorses and clothes horses (the classroom vs the 
admin) , a number of the slightly grumpy, over worked but technically 
competent teachers ("work horses) started to set up these Moodle 
servers, and see what they could do. And they could do lots - from the 
lame, almost Facebook style of teacher-collation of resources that 
Connect and Edmodo users are familiar with, to intelligent, adaptive 
lesson sequences that altered the order of instruction according to the 
particular set of misconceptions that a learner had. Yep, I know, I 
wrote a few in 2010 - the potential was fantastic. The future looked rosy.

Then a bit of a backlash set in. Grumpy old teachers need a certain 
degree of finesse in managing. Additionally, they don't bully well, and 
it is very hard for a school administration to manage. It is the old 
leadership/teamwork problem: you need to be a bit more inspirational 
than the typical sort of "Judas sheep leadership" in a polyester suit 
that is sometimes held up as leadership in schools. Eventually, Moodle 
was all but banned from schools, and after a rumoured expenditure of in 
excess of $25 000 000 on Connect, it has all but disappeared from the 
State School system.

Moodle, however, hasn't disappeared from the world stage - far from it. 
The General Certificate of Brewing that I was awarded in 2006 was 
taught, distance, from London, on a Moodle server. So are a large number 
of college courses. Moodle analytics lead the field, with tools and 
dashboards to analyse the teaching cycle from lesson plans to student 
misconceptions to student learning outcomes. It is just that the large 
number of good consultants aren't based here, so much. I reckon, for a 
couple of million or less, a gold-edged customised system for the ED 
(hey Numbat, that does not stand for erectile disfunction!) department 
could have been had. The open source codebase would have meant that it 
was cheaper to maintain, and the cash flow would have created an 
industry in WA. Such an industry always will over-produce people - they 
form a talent base that could have gone onto other things, innovating 
and creating new opportunities in this state.

Instead, what do we have? We have a closed Connect system, that is 
dependent on Oracle databases, and a continual need to update them, 
resulting in an elevated cost of ownership. (Gee, I hope that someone at 
least got crayfish at that sales lunch!). We send the profits from most 
of that $25 million overseas, and that suppresses growth of endemic 
talent. Finally, we have an inferior product, which can only evolve at 
great cost, and which has a much more limited range of capabilities.

We do have a contented management, happy that there aren't all these 
rebel Moodle servers around the place, and pleased to not have to tread 
lightly around the prima donna-ish self-made administrators. It is just 
that, hardly anyone here can code well, computer literacy is very low 
(although computer consumerism and computer dependency is high).

I raise all of this because I would like to draw your attention to the 
current STEM situation. In particular, please consider these three points:

1) To what extent is STEM a political solution, and to what extent is it 
a technical solution?

2) How do you stop the clothes horses from suppressing the work horses, 
and in doing destroying the breadth of the talent base. (Hint: who is 
getting funding).

3) How many engineers, geologists, and scientists  have you met on 
teaching prac recently? Is it ethical to create a workforce of the same, 
if no jobs for them exist, or if to supply the jobs that do exist, you 
have to produce a multi-fold excess of people. (We call such people 
"unemployed", but only after they have a 50K HECS debt and have studied 
for 5 years!).


I certainly hope that if another Moodle falls into the lap of this 
state, that it is not squandered like last time! Do you think our 
redirection of focus onto STEM might deliver one?