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Preston / Reservoir Adult Community Education |
PRACE |
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interview with Martin Dougiamas
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backgroundWhat first inspired you to build your own "learning management system"? Fed up with the corporate tools? Indeed. I was working with WebCT, and got frustrated with being able to customise it for our local environment, as well as seeing the frustration of teachers trying to use it for their classes. There had to be a better way, I thought. Later I drifted into teaching myself and wanted to try all sorts of new things that the current tools couldn't do for me. Your background is in Higher Ed., at Curtin University - you were the webmaster and manager of the WebCT systems - that must have been a great preparation for managing such a large development project as moodle? Probably the best thing was the daily contact with a large variety of teachers using the system - I'd been supporting them in online education for years so I developed a pretty good idea for their needs and concerns. The best kind of support involves education, since it reduces the support you have to do later! The other way to reduce calls for help is to improve the toolset. In fact, real development was minimal, since we were using WebCT we had to work with what we were given. Project management is something I learned later (and am still learning. obviously!) after being involved in a number of other open source projects. Could you tell us something about the sort of content areas you've taught? Are you still teaching at all, and has all your teaching been entirely online? I taught a course called Hypertext 212 at Curtin Business School - this was basically a crash course in web development for business undergraduates, taking them through conceptual understanding of how the web works and ending up with a group-developed web site. Until recently I also co-taught a postgrad course called Constructivism, which as you might imagine is quite theoretical. This course was the context for a lot of Moodle development and my PhD includes case studies of these courses. Nowadays, I'm teaching more than ever, all my teaching
and moderation is within the Moodle community, ranging from very technical
programming issues through to pedagogical issues. I also help a lot of
clients who are using my hosting on Moodle.com.
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interview with Martin Dougiamas
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How to contact us at Preston/Reservoir Adult Community Education (PRACE) |
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Physical: Merrilands Community Centre, cnr Asquith & Sturdee Streets, Reservoir, 3073. Postal: PO Box 510 |
Phone:
9462 6077 |
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prace.vic.edu.au