Moodle Docs: Background





Background

Moodle is an active and evolving work in progress. Development was started
by Martin
Dougiamas who continues to lead the project:

I've been working on it, in some way or other, for several years. It
started in the 90's when I was webmaster at Curtin
University of Technology and a system administrator of their WebCT installation.
I encountered many frustrations with the WebCT beast and developed an itch
that needed scratching - there had to be a better way (no, not Blackboard
:-)
I also know a lot of people in schools and smaller institutions (and
some big ones!) who want to make better use of the Internet but don't know
where to start in the maze of technologies and pedagogies that are out there.
I've always hoped there would be a Free alternative that such people could
use to help them move their teaching skills into the online environment.
My strong beliefs in the unrealised possibilities of Internet-based education
led me to complete a Masters and then a PhD in Education, combining my former
career in Computer Science with newly constructed knowledge about the nature
of learning and collaboration. In particular, I am particularly influenced
by the epistemology of social constructionism - which not only treats learning
as a social activity, but focusses attention on the learning that occurs while
actively constructing artifacts (such as texts) for others to see or use.

It is crucial to me that this software be easy to use - in fact it should
be as intuitive as possible.
I'm committed to continuing my work on Moodle and on keeping it Open
and Free. I have a deeply-held belief in the importance of unrestricted education
and empowered teaching, and Moodle is the main way I can contribute to the
realisation of these ideals.

A number of early prototypes were produced and discarded before he released
version 1.0 upon a largely unsuspecting world on August 20, 2002. This version
was targeted towards smaller, more intimate classes at University level, and
was the subject of research case studies that closely analysed the nature of
collaboration and reflection that occurred among these small groups of adult
participants.
Since then there has been steady series of new releases adding new features,
better scalability and improved performance.
As Moodle has spread and the community has grown, more input is being drawn
from a wider variety of people in different teaching situations. For example,
Moodle is now used not only in Universities, but in high schools, primary schools,
non-profit organisations, private companies, by independent teachers and even
homeschooling parents. A growing number of people from around the world are
contributing to Moodle in different ways - for more details see the Credits
page.
An important feature of the Moodle project is the moodle.org
web site, which provides a central point for information, discussion and collaboration
among Moodle users, who include system administrators, teachers, researchers,
instructional designers and of course, developers. Like Moodle, this site is
always evolving to suit the needs of the community, and like Moodle it will
always be Free.
Later in 2003, moodle.com will be launched
as a company providing additional commercial support for those need it, as a
well as a variety of exciting new services.
For more about our future plans for Moodle, see the Future
roadmap.

Moodle Documentation
Version: $Id: background.html,v 1.4 2003/05/27 15:18:19 moodler Exp $