More about Moodle

1
More about Moodle

• Who uses Moodle?
• Where do I find Moodle?
• How secure is Moodle?
• How do I start using Moodle?
• What is the pedagogy behind Moodle?
• Is it scalable?
• What were your costs?

2
Who Uses Moodle?

• Almost 10,000 live sites
• 2300 in the US
• From Mr. Musgrave's Online Writing Center to
  Yukon Flats School District Moodle
• Majority are University and Secondary schools

• Over 100,000 registered users
• Courses 320,940
• Users 3,431,630
• Teachers 593,486
• Enrolments 5,315,983
• Forum Posts 3,573,493
• Resources 1,919,250
• Quiz questions 2,061,641

3
Where do I find Moodle?(and what's under the
hood)

• www.moodle.org
• Downloads
• Documentation
• Forums and free support
• Add-on modules and filters
• Development

• Written in php (a scripting language)
• Runs on a web server (typically Apache but IIS
  works too)
• Database (MySQL or PostgreSQL)
• Linux, MacOSX or Windows XP

4
How secure is Moodle?

• How secure is your web server? Your database?
• php, webserver and database security patches need
  to be kept current on any system.
• Is your site backed up? Scheduled backups are
  done as frequently as you want.
• security.moodle.org has alerts, updates which you
  can receive by email or newsfeed.
• Features allow instructors to limit file upload
  size or restrict file extensions.

5
How do I start using Moodle?

• Recommend you talk to your local IT folks before
  running a webserver (they get testy about things
  like that)
• Download Moodle from moodle.org
• Linux package assumes database and webserver
  already set up
• MacOSX and WinXP complete package include Apache
  and MySQL

6
What is the pedagogy behind Moodle?

• Moodle was built with social constructionist
  pedagogy
• 4 Main Ideas
• Constructivism-- people actively construct
  knowledge while interacting with their
  environment
• Constructionism learning is most effective when
  people construct knowledge for others to
  experience
• Social Constructivisim extends constructionism
  to social groups
• Separate and Connected two ways of constructing
  new knowledge

7
Is it scalable?

• 100 sites with more than 5000 users
• The site with the most users is moodle.org with
  40 courses and 101626 users.
• The site with the most courses is Online Campus
  with 8242 courses and 53447 users.
• CCSU Chemistry Moodle has 65 users currently
• Moodle can be spread over multiple webservers and
  be served by a database cluster and can
  accommodate single sign-on

8
What were your costs?

• Need a box, we have one sized large enough to
  cover every chemistry student (200 max)
• 2X200GB Hard drives
• dual 2 GHz processors with 3 GB RAM
• 3000
• Need to have an administrator, but once installed
  all of the controls are web interfaces
• Probably need a geek for more than a department
  sized installation

9
References

• http//www.moodle.org
• http//security.moodle.org
• Constructionism Harel, I. Papert, S. (Eds.).
  1991 Norwood, MA Ablex Publishing.
• Fuchs, Stephan THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF
  SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE Sociological Theory
  Fall86, Vol. 4 Issue 2, p126-142, 17p
• Constructionism in Practice Designing, Thinking,
  and Learning in a Digital World Yasmin B. Kafai
  (editor), Mitchel Resnick (editor) Lawrence
  Erlbaum Assoc Inc, 1996