The Auricle

One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is how easily open source course management systems like Moodle will scale. So let's see what the Using Moodle forums have to offer here. Once in the Using Moodle forums I keyed 'scaleability' into the Moodle site search engine and got one article returned! But all was not lost, keying 'scalability' seemed to do the trick. One article posed the question:

“Who are the largest users? I'd love to know how may classes, sections, students and enrollments they're able to run.”

I selected the above posting as the parent and chose a threaded view of the discussion which ensued. This provided me with a chain of messages from January to August 2004. Here are some extracts:

“The biggest active site I know has 1400 courses and about 17000 students.” Martin Dougiamas

“There are no limitations inherent in Moodle … it all comes down to hardware grunt and that depends on many factors such as the features being used and how they are being used. More RAM and more CPU can solve any problem” Martin Dougiamas

“When looking at the CPU and RAM, is there a way to split Moodle up onto multiple servers. For example, a Server for just the Database, and a series of Servers for student Interface.” Charles Libby

“It is definitely possible to build a Linux cluster from multiple computers and run Moodle on it.” Martin Dougiamas

“… we potentially have a vast user base; especially when you add in the wider use in the Adult and community Learning sector (potentially 70,000 plus users).” Ted Edmondson … “You might be foolhardy installing one single Moodle for all those users, though things might be improved by 2006.” Martin Dougiamas

As readers of last Friday's Moodle Meanderings article will have seen Martin Dougiamas (he of Moodle fame) invites interested parties to join in the Using Moodle forums. So I've pitched in to said forums with some comments on how syndication solutions like RSS/Atom could be exploited. Martin Dougiamas is lead developer for Moodle which he initiated in 1999.

Using Moodle is for those who are interested in how Moodle development (technical and pedagogical). Tracking down the best forum for RSS discussions was a little difficult but eventually I alighted on the Blocks forum where I found a well populated discussion initiated by Paul De Jong called RSS feed (news) in a block. Blocks are Moodle sidebar components found either on a home or course page. Paul has created a block which allows one RSS channel per course to be configured by an administrator or teacher. Students can then link to resources from this channel at the course level. Different courses can have different channels specified.

Now while I like what Paul has done the power of such a Moodle block would be considerably magnified if instead of configuring one RSS channel per block a list of channels could be specified so that the student could select from a range of possible distributed feeds. And what if the Moodle block could be configured to allow students to add their own RSS channels of interest (which could be private or shared)?

Also, why lock such functionality just to the course or topic level? A Moodle course can be configured to present weekly or as numbered topics. Why should a different syndication block not be available each week?

I remain quite impressed with Moodle but my previous comment about tracking down coherent sources of information still stands. Our understanding of what it is doing and intending to do has improved since last week but we've had to work hard at gathering bits from here and there in the forums. The forums seem to be more component than issues driven meaning that, for example, important RSS information could be distributed over a number of forums.

Nevertheless, at the moment, I feel it is definitely worth persisting and hopefully, because interest in Moodle is increasing, the growing community will 'evolve' better documentation. I want to like this initiative and its deliverables but let's see how I feel in a few weeks.

Now who is going to write the seminal Moodle book?

Now that Moodle, the open-source course management system, is fast approaching its 1.4 release we've started to give it a serious look over. So here is the first of what might become a series of impressions. I've looked at the 1.4 Developer release of Moodle, but this is pretty stable and is representative of what will be available by the end of this month (August 2004). Other people are doing a pretty good job of the comparison with proprietary VLEs so I'm going to focus on areas of specific interest to us.

Let's start with the positive stuff.

Moodle appears to be relatively easy to setup, configure and create courses with. It's PHP/MySQL based (it also works with other databases) which is reflected in the sizeable developer community which appears to have grown around it. Institutions which haven't committed to an enterprise version of a proprietary VLE, therefore, may find Moodle of interest. For example, in February Dublin City University opted for institutional scale deployment of Moodle.

Moodle is open source + support with the business model reliant on the latter. For the former go to moodle.org and for the latter moodle.com. I'm comfortable with this since there appears to be scope for creativity, public good and ethical business practice.

Authentication can be directly handled by Moodle or via an external database (including LDAP). I've previously tested authenticating Moodle via our test PostNuke site and this worked without a problem, i.e. ensuring that users could only access Moodle if they had accessed it via our PostNuke portal/content management system.

We found that, unlike Blackboard, Moodle really values data arising from discussions and so it's possible to remove a student from courses or even delete them from the system with their discussion contributions appear to live beyond their personal demise. It's also nice to see Moodle offering a range of discussion views so that there are options to the ubiquitious but perhaps dysfunctional threaded view.

Moodle asserts a 'constructivist' model underpins its design. This translates into 'communication functionality is important and people learn from activities supported by appropriate resources and assessment'. The implementation of this within Moodle is fairly intuitive with courses having three formats, i.e. topic based (less time pressure), weekly based (sense of pace++) and social (discussion orientated). The first two formats both allow resources and activities to be attached to the appropriate topic or time slot.

Moodle seems to recognize the importance of syndication with, to date, its forums (including news) and glossary producing RSS output for input to other systems. As far as RSS input goes there is a simple RSS component (a block in Moodle speak) which allows a single RSS feed for the home page or for each course. This means it's possible for syndicated resources to be made available to students. Pity it's only at the course level and with only one feed but there is obvious scope for further development.

There's some work also taking place in the integration of blog functionality within Moodle. Still a work-in-progress but this looks quite promising. I'm unsure whether this will offer blogs at site or course level only. It would be good if each student could have personal blog which they could choose to share with other users or not. There is a journal learning activity at the moment but that is more an assignment tool accessible by a single student and their teacher rather than a configurable private/shareable resource.

So what's less good?

All Moodle sites tend to look the same! To me, aesthetically, it's full of 'sharp' edges and has a tendency to garish colours. I understand, however, that Moodle themes are an important area of development and so I suspect sites will begin to be more differentiated in the future.

While I like the Calendar feature nice it would be good to be able to configure this as the default home page interface and expand it out to a daily/weekly/monthly view by default.

There is a simple batch enrol facility but no apparent equivalent for batch unenrol or user deletion. I suspect that for larger numbers of students the original developers assumed linkage to a central database leaving manual maintenance for the smaller-scale courses.

Want to clone a course or parts thereof? No XML import/export a la ATutor is implemented as yet (although it's slated); so placing reliance on backup and restore via a zip file is all you've got.

And what about those IMS specifications? Not much on offer here at the moment I'm afraid but I suspect this position will change as the Moodle impetus continues to grow. Anyway all these declarations of IMS compliance between leading vendors doesn't appear to be having an earth shattering impact on the ground … as yet:)

Some of the discussion on the Moodle developer forums have focused on the philosophical match of Moodle's learning activity + learning resource with that of the IMS Learning Design specification. The latter is considerably more complex in implementation than Moodle's relatively simple implementation … not necessarily a criticism.

While it's possible to configure timed release of lessons (really branching tutorials) I found such lessons to be accessible outside the times I had set. Maybe I'm just confused about the purpose of the 'available from' parameters. The timed chat facility is also available all the time although a message does appear telling you when the action is due to start.

Moodle, like most other learning management systems, assumes that most learning resources are best stored within its own digestive system instead of within a separate repository or distributed over a wide variety of sources. Again, this issue is recognized in the developer's forums and there is some work taking place on the development of a document management system, but this is still very much a work-in-progress. At the same time what's perhaps necessary is an equal focus on the support and exploitation of distributed resources via RSS/Atom etc.

What's also less good is the apparent paucity of documentation with worked examples on how to create a Moodle component. There are some commented sources but the environment could really take off if there a few really cogent books/documents on how to build Moodle. As it is I found myself scrambling around gathering bits of information here and there.

To conclude.

We've not yet looked at group and user management so I guess that's next.

As my previous Auricle articles have suggested I'm no fan of the current generation of VLEs but Moodle has started to break the mould. It's more conservative than it perhaps alludes to but it's easy to understand and results should be achievable quite quickly and so, despite my reservations, I found myself quite liking what's beginning to emerge. If I were a vendor of proprietary VLEs I would start to worry and perhaps rethink my business model.

What's that I hear … vendor X has announced that from next month they are giving away their full enterprise system … and you only need to pay xxx,000 for support 🙂

E-Health Insider reports that the NHS 'University' has cancelled its procurement of a 'virtual campus'. The E-Health Insider article states:

“The virtual campus was intended to form the cornerstone of the NHSU, providing learners and tutors with access to information and resources. NHSU was also planning to use the virtual campus as its spine for management, teaching, research, learner administration and support purposes.”

The focus, apparently, is now on the development of a learning management system. IBM and LogicaCMG had been shortlisted to deliver the project so let's hope they didn't invest too much in preparing their bids. Let's also hope that the recent demise of the UKeU isn't having a detrimental effect on such risk taking development or we're all going to be sentenced to a few proprietary vendors coming to dominate the market, which can't be good for anyone. If so, we had better hope that the open source movement provides the necessary counter balance. To prepare for this counter balance, as today's OLDaily suggests, you could do worse than read the International Open Source Network (IOSN) primer Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) from schools to universities.

We've now activated Auricle's mailing list function. So if you want to receive notification of new Auricle articles or other events please self-register your email address in the mailing list field (right hand menu). We will not offer your email details to any other party.

I'm presently looking into blogs that offer some different functionality than presently available in pMachine Pro for a colleague and I came across this very useful comparision chart by Owen.
In addition to this very useful chart, Owen has links to the OpenSourceCMS site which hosts demo versions of various php/mysql CMS applications including the likes of Drupal, pMachine free (the free version of this blog), Moodle, ACollab etc.
The site allows you admin access to the systems so you can get a reasonable look around (a few functions have been disabled for security reasons). The system is then cleared down every 2 hours.
I think this is a great site for doing some of that initial evaluation into a potential CMS/Blog/Discussion Forum/etc candidate - I only wish I found it earlier.
And if you want to find out which blog Owen finally chose, you can view his blog entry on his decision here.

Over at Michael Feldstein's E-Literate site he has a couple of articles which are worth a look. The first, What's Wrong with the Sakai User Interface is a polemic less about Sakai than the discussion component offered in the first public release. Michael makes some excellent points about the limitations of 'threaded' discussion particularly: “Conversation branches in threaded interfaces usually do not intertwine; they fragment. They become separate conversations … the discussion board interface forces fragmentation of conversation …”

Michael picks out the 'reply to' button as particularly problematic since this encourages replies to a tangent and not the main conversation. He contends that the default for a reply button should be to the conversation and then perhaps an optional 'reply to a branch'. What's important is a whole conversation view rather than the fragmented tree view so beloved of current systems. He's got a point.

His second article Sakai's Okay? contains a response from a correspondent who points out that the discussion facility he criticizes in his first article should really be criticism of a legacy service (the University of Michigan's Chef) which is being delivered via Sakai (an architecture project) and not Sakai itself.

So Michael's primary article raises an important issue of relevance to us all and a reader's response improves our understanding of the Sakai Project … the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.

I'm on holiday for the next couple of weeks but I'm sure my colleagues will attempt to keep the articles ticking over:)

A quick visit to the Sakai Project led me to an interesting article in which Syllabus Magazine interviewed Ira Fuchs the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's vice president for research in information technology. The Mellon Foundation supports the Sakai Project to the tune of USD 2.4 million so Fuchs' views on the future of learning management systems makes for interesting reading. I think the following few Ira Fuchs' quotes from the Syllabus Magazine article Learning Management Systems: Are We There Yet? (1 July 2004) speak for themselves.

“… it's going to be hard to move away from the proprietary systems they may be running today and to begin using open, collaboratively developed and maintained systems. I think open systems are going to prevail, but it's going to take time.”

“It's my hope that proprietary course management systems will, over time, be supplanted by open systems that facilitate collaboration and sharing of both course materials and content, with software designed to extend the CMS itself.”

“… the notable, visible success of some of the open source projects - the big ones like Linux, Apache, or MySQL - have proven that it's possible to develop something in the open and get people to commit to maintain and enhance the software.”

“The proliferation of learning management systems suggests that no one system is sufficiently feature-rich, or adequately flexible and extensible enough to meet everyone's needs or even most institutions' requirements.”

“… we need to make all of this distributed information available in the learning management system without the user having to learn so many different interfaces. ”

“The LMS of the future will be a distribution point for the digital textbook. Electronic course packs, I think, will also be distributed via the LMS.”

“I think there’s still going to be plenty of room for commercial firms to develop and sell modules that fit into the open framework. I also think there will be a significant demand for services related to course management systems, including maintenance and custom enhancements. However, a new business model will be required.”

Any major VLE vendor after reading this article should perhaps be contemplating how to revise their business model?

If we accept the Fuch's view then we all need to start thinking about how distributed information and resources will be found and delivered. We also need to start weaning ourselves off the concept of learning management systems being the sole vehicles and repositories of information and content. My Auricle articles of the last few days have attempted to address this issue.

I've waxed lyrical about these themes in several previous Auricle articles. You can revisit these articles by selecting the 'View by Category' from the 'Archives' section of the right-hand menu and choose any of the articles in the MLE/VLE/Portals category or, for issues related to distributed learning resources, you could try the 'Resource Discovery' category.