The Hindu Business Line : Moodle along

It can be downloaded and used it on any computer (including Web hosts) to make Internet-based courses and Web sites. From single users, it can scale to a `50,000-student University'.

Course matter may be posted and edited by the teacher in charge. Students can e-mail in suggestions and assignments with email IDs provided after verification.

Though it is yet to become popular in India, A.S.Guha, IGNOU, Shillong has a course set up at www.talkingcommunities.com

The features of the product are clearly outlined at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Features. Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OSX, Netware and any other system that supports PHP. Facilitating the role of teachers beyond classroom, the chat module allows a smooth, synchronous text interaction. All sessions are logged for later viewing, and these can also be made available to students. Since Moodle can easily import content in a wide range of standard formats, including SCORM, converting from the present format isn't a hassle.

Martin Dougiamas, who initiated the project and continues to work on it, says on http://docs.moodle.org/en/Background, "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."

Help is available at Moodle.org and Moodle Community Forums. For beginners the demo section is a good visit. There are pages you can learn to edit on and create pages. Since they are demo pages they are wiped clean every hour so there are no chances of novices messing anything up. As the http://docs.moodle.org/en/About_Moodle page says, "The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course. Anyone who uses Moodle is a Moodler."

The wikipedia says, "It has a very large user base with 12,165 registered sites in 155 countries with 4,021,531 users in 376,565 courses (as of May30, 2006)" and is all set to grow larger.

paromita@thehindu.co.in