Goodbye (Mostly) to Moodle: Hello Open, And Goodbye to Closed

Goodbye (Mostly) to Moodle: Hello Open, And Goodbye to Closed

The old saying goes … “Knowledge is Power!” But, as Nelson Mandela said, “Education is one of the most powerful things that we have to change the World" … for people to achieve their full potential … to free people from poverty to enable people to take control of their lives … to enable debate and to understand different viewpoints … to see the world in different ways and to ask questions on how we can improve things.

So why do we still hide our knowledge within systems that feel like they have been created in the 1990s? A whole new open source world is evolving, and providing new ways for people to access educational material.

Teaching should be all about content, and the platform and medium by which this is delivered should matter little. Some of us like to read books to learn, some read from PDFs, and others like to learn from video. And so we need platforms that can deliver content in a way that supports the learner.

My style is to produce the content in many different formats and make it all open source. I see no advantage of hiding content away within restricted areas, and then provided by local resources. The Cloud now provides us with new ways to provide the medium, and it is a platform that enables learning from every device and every part of the world. And so I have always struggled with Moodle as a standard platform for educational content.

As a coder, I can create content in the way that I want it, and maintain my own code. For the majority of teachers, though, Moodle is great, as it allows for the delivery of the content to be customised without the complexity of having to code. For me, it is just too much work in engineering Moodle to do anything that I would see properly defining a portable and maintainable environment. I’ve also struggled with its sluggish and clunky message boards, and its lack of proper version control. While it was great a decade ago, the world has moved on, and tools such as Slack provide an almost real-time discussion place. Obviously the management of the discussion space in Slack needs to be carefully controlled, but it is a place that students can easily contact their tutor, and a place to share information.

With Slack, tutors can see, often, who is the most active, and also see who is — possibly — the least active (and perhaps someone who needs a little bit of support and guidance). I appreciate Moodle does things like this, but it always adds a considerable amount of overhead in anything that you do, and it still often uses the older ways of alerting (such as email). As someone who can receive over a thousand emails a day, it can be difficult to cope with messages than come through over the day. With Slack, it can always be sure that I’m up-to-date at the end of the day.

And, this year, along with my on-line content, it is to Github I turn to, to provide a source of the content. As a provider, they now offer me unlimited space, which is a great deal more than my limited Moodle account. With a “git push” or a “git pull”, I can update my tutorial code, and I can fix bugs in documents and presentations, while making sure it is always fresh. Students can add comments for updates, and I can place new material there with a quick update. For Moodle, the concept of maintaining versions is just now an option. And … it’s used by industry, so we are getting our students used to using the tools that they will use when they go into the workplace.

And so, it is to YouTube that can provide the final part of the open source platform, and where our content is increasingly consumed. Many teachers might debate the usefulness of watching video presentations, but it is now the place than many will turn to for education. As a way to access content, there are few platforms better than YouTube, and to host video content on a local university server is an overhead that is just not worth it.

So, in conclusion, for my cryptography material for Semester 2, it is going to be Slack, Github and YouTube that will provide a core deliver method for the content and in discussions with students. There is no one size fits all, but providing one tool that supports every way of learning is often not the best way to support students these days.

Each teacher must choose their own way to deliver their content, and the ways in which they are must comfortable with. To constrain this too much is not a thing that is healthy, and can often stifle innovation.

I repeat the statement … “Education is the most powerful weapon we can use to change the world.” Your own education, or to educate others, should be at the core of your ambitions for 2019. We are all teachers and we are all learners. Once we stop doing that, everyone loses.