Quo vadis Moodle?
One of the core Moodle developers put an almost innocent note into our Jabber chat recently and I can’t stop thinking about it. And no, it’s not about hating Google. The Quiz module is one of the most advanced activity module we have in Moodle. It seems to be popular and often requested by the newcomers. It even may be considered as a feature that helped Moodle to become first class LMS. I personally use it sometimes as a teacher, too. It’s just so quick and easy to prepare a question bank and let students to prepare themselves for the evaluation quiz. Yes, I trivialize the issue here. I know it’s not so easy to prepare valid and relevant questions, analyse the responses, modify the questions with low discrimination capability etc. But honestly – how many teachers do this?
Conditional activities subsystem has been committed into the repository and is one of the Moodle 2.0 highlights. It enables course designers to restrict the availability of any activity according to certain conditions such as dates, grade obtained, or activity completion. The world has been waiting for this feature since ages. And Sam really did a good job – kudos for him!
Now, the little worm in the back of my mind starts to whisper: Shh! Wait! This all starts to smell like a SCORM too much! Is not it a little bit strange that the automatically evaluated Quiz is so matured, while the Forum, the essential tool for constructivistic online courses, still lacks such essential features like to subscribe to individual threads, to mark (or tag) the thread as closed, to collapse the parts of the displayed threads etc.? When did we last improve our good old Forum in a really significant way? Why do we not support real cooperation of the students? We are still not able to group students into a team and grade the team work instead of individual students, for example.
I am all for these Moodle 2.0 changes, portfolios, repositories, database layers, webservices, output rendering frameworks, core architecture clean-ups and refactoring. Moodle becomes really nice cathedral in many areas. I only hope I can still start my Moodle presentations saying that the Moodle development has been always driven by a solid pedagogical theory and by its users’ needs. But also, Moodle has always helped teachers to get constructivism into the class simply because using Moodle forced teachers to think in terms of students activity. Not only the Moodle development is driven by teachers’ needs. Moodle learns teachers how to teach in a different (hopefully better) way. I consider this the most important face of Moodle and I wish it would not be put into the shadow in the light of all the bright and glittering cherries of the future release.
August 26th, 2009 at 18:32
I’m really pleased to see conditional activities being introduced. For language teaching it’s particularly useful, and I think it’s a useful feature for weaker learners too.
Can’t comment on whether it is like SCORM (Never used it), but what if it is? I see this argument a lot in Open Office forums – if it looks like Microsoft, it can’t be good. For me a good idea is a good idea, whoever it comes from.
As for the Forum features, I’d love my learners to use them more, but it’s a really hard sell. I don’t think this is because of the lack of features in the forum module, it’s just that a lot of learners simply don’t like the idea.
Just my two cents’ worth.
August 27th, 2009 at 03:08
Don’t worry, you aren’t the only one. Yes Moodle 2 has a lot of new infrastructure (for many important reasons), but my mantra for 2.1 and beyond is going to be “no more refactoring” … we will be focussing very heavily on pedagogy and all the activity modules.