Moodle driving jobs in education

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It's amazing, the opportunities a disruptive technology can offer to those who take the time to learn it.  If you know your Moodle, there are more than 100 jobs available, right now, today -- and for some of them, you don't even need to change out of your pajamas.

It's also a great lesson about the different business models that open source can create.  Red Hat has built a very successful publicly traded company selling service subscriptions to open source software product.  Other companies, like Acquia, have created profitable consulting and services businesses.

Here we see the extreme other end of the spectrum: a technology that has become widely deployed, globally distributed, and highly localized -- thus, ideal for a worldwide marketplace for individual service providers.  The job site at moodle.org lists positions from Silicon Valley to London, from Idaho to Kuala Lumpur.  Full-time, part-time, telecommute.  All offered within the past several months.

Looking at some of the job descriptions gives immediate insights into why open source is so useful.  Many of these job offers are for very specific modifications to Moodle.  One can't help but wonder how effective Moodle is, as a community, in reintegrating these kinds of efforts -- but one thing is for certain: they've got a way better shot at it than Blackboard does.

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Greg DeKoenigsberg is the Vice President of Community for Ansible, where he leads the company's relationship with the broader open source community. Greg brings to Ansible over a decade of open source product and community leadership, with the majority of this time spent building and leading communities for open source leader Red Hat.

13 Comments

I used it last semester for a programming class. The assignment collection and grade book capabilities (insanely flexible) were awesome, and being able to show my students open source in action added a concrete example to my lectures.

...curious: if you wanted to share any of your Moodle materials, would you even know how to begin?

Sharing as in what, exposing things publicly to non-logged in members?

I took down the site when the semester ended, so I can't poke around. I know I used the file section a lot to share things out to my students, I'd probably start there to see what permissions it offered.

Why do you ask?

Moodle2.0 will have a course sharing/community hub apparatus, but in the meantime the best (I'm not saying it's great) place to share resources is Moodlecommons.org.

I would venture that there seems to be a huge gap in the # of courses and quantity of information in Moodle and the availability of courses to download.

You can also check out the exchange databases at Moodle.org (you'll need to register first though).

...I'll bet that you would have a ton more to share on this topic, wouldn't you? :)

you have no idea.

I work as an in-house Moodle developer at a 6th form college, and I can categorically say that if Moodle wasn't open source it wouldn't be nearly as useful as it is. Every institution has different needs, and the ability to completely specialise Moodle is invaluable.

On top of that, the Moodle community model fits in very well with the philosophy of education and sharing knowledge that Moodle was created to support.

Moodleshare.com is also a good place to go for sharing/finding Moodle content.

Interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

Moodle can run on Lighttpd using even less resources than on Apache. Please check if a small ( 70MB) VMware Virtual machine download from the home page link above can be useful to turn most laptops/desktops into a moodle learning/development platform.

Having worked for Australia's largest Moodle Partner company for a couple of years now I have to say that it is an awesome environment to be in right now. When I talk to people who are used to proprietary systems the biggest differences that they tend to find are the huge user community that are genuinely keen to contribute back to the wider community, and the flexibility of being open source (which we then try to balance with good Enterprise application management practices).

The financial model for the 'Moodle ecosystem' seems to be working well too - the software development path is still moving well, the localised Partner scheme gives a guarantee (more or less) that money will continue to flow into the Trust to keep development going, and ultimately people are still by and large loving the software and reaping the benefits of using something that doesn't have to cost as much as proprietary LMS.

As for the lack of courseware being shared, I reckon its more to do with educational institutions often being a little reluctant to share IP, particularly in the higher education sector where its a competitive market for the student dollar. Just my thoughts, could be completely wrong :)

Mark.

An OpenCourseWare is a free and open digital publication of high quality educational materials, organized as courses. The OpenCourseWare Consortium is a collaboration of more than 200 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model. The mission of the OpenCourseWare Consortium is to advance education and empower people worldwide through opencourseware.

http://www.ocwconsortium.org/index.php

There is also a digital repository of open courses you can download from http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/ (and import into your own Moodle).
But besides Moodle, there are also other LMS worth an interest (both in terms of features and employment market): ATutor, Ilias, Chamilo (http://www.chamilo.org) which all have their own highs and lows, but are all open source and with important communities.
Often people forget that the fact that Moodle exists doesn't mean it is the best solution for you (it is still awfully complicated for the teacher to get into).

Merry Christmas to all!

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