Martin Dougiamas: Why Openness in Education is essential
You probably never heard of Moodle - unless you are a student. Moodle is the worlds most widely used educational platform and it's free software available under the GNU GPL version 3. Martin Dougiamas, who originally wrote Moodle, held a talk explaining what Moodle is, what features it has, what's planned for the future and what proprietary software it competes with at the NextCloud 2020 conference that took place October 2nd to 3rd, 2020. The video is 36 minutes long and worth a watch if you want some insights into modern education systems.
written by 윤채경 (Yoon Chae-kyung) 2020-09-14 - last edited 2020-10-14. © CC BY
Copyright 2020 The Nextcloud Conference. License: Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY)
"As the founder and CEO of Moodle, the most-used education platform in the world (and open source like Nextcloud), Martin is committed to making sure the world always has Open alternatives for all the technology and resources needed in education. In this presentation, he'll talk about some of the current industry trends and the technology battles that are taking place around us right now."
Moodle is the only widely used free software educational platform. All the competing products, like Blackboard, Canvas, Brightspace and Sakai, are closed-source proprietary software solutions.
"Schools have a social mission: to teach students to be citizens of a strong, capable, independent, cooperating and free society. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote conservation and voting. By teaching students free software, they can graduate citizens ready to live in a free digital society. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated by megacorporations."
Moodle's website is at moodle.com. Moodle is a for-profit company, they are not developing Moodle in order to make the world a better place. Their business model is to sell "Robust, reliable and affordable hosting" for their educational software platform. They aren't that greedy, the first choice listed at moodle.com/pricing/ is "Do it yourself", Free Download. It's a standard PHP application, installing and testing it is strait forward if you're a wizard who knows how to install and setup a web server and a PHP application.
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