Nine years ago, in Australia, a Computer Science graduate named Martin Dougiamas was trialing a web tool he'd developed to help teachers create lessons online. Inspired by his own experiences with the outback "School of the Air". Martin's Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment offered tutors a way to connect remotely with their students in a collaborative and supportive workspace.
Did any of us foresee back then just how global a phenomenon Moodle would become? Now used by over 31 million students in over 44 thousand sites in over 200 countries, Moodle has truly changed the face of learning.
With improved access to the internet, and with commercial companies being quick to spot a potential money-earner, many such Learning Management Systems have arisen since then. What makes Moodle special, however, is the fact that it has remained as Open Source technology. Anyone can use Moodle; everyone can make Moodle better. While official Moodle Partners will give you peace of mind if you want Moodle installed at your establishment, you are also entirely free to go for it alone. If you need advice, whether of a pedagogical or technical nature, ask in the forums at http://moodle.org/ where the doors are never closed. If you spot an error or a bug, then someone (perhaps even you) will fix it. If you have an idea for a "plug-in" that might be useful for other Moodlers worldwide, you can put forth your suggestion to the community. The world changes constantly and Moodle changes with it.
Since its official "birth" in 2002, Moodle has gone through several full versions and a number of stable releases in between. You can even catch up on all the bug fixes and minor tweaks by downloading the weekly stable "+" build. This year, however, sees the advent of the latest, biggest, and most enhanced version: Moodle 2.0. It's a new "take" on an established package. It is rich with new features, and it retains all that was good from Moodle 1.9, blended with new ideas and improvements, suggested and developed by the huge Open Source community. Moodle 2.0 has been a long time in the making. Its arrival became somewhat of an in-joke on the forums of www.moodle.org. Over the last couple of years, the answer to many a query would has been "You can't do that yet, but you will be able to in Moodle 2.0" prompting one Moodle Partner to comment that alongside better navigation, cleaner appearance, more controlled activities, enhanced modules, and improved interaction, Moodle 2.0 was expected to "sort out wars and world famine". Well, they haven't quite managed that, (Although there's still time for Moodle 3.0!), but there are sufficient new features in Moodle 2 to warrant a close look, and that is the purpose of this book.
This book aims to give users familiar with Moodle an insight into the new features of Moodle 2.0. Perhaps you've been using Moodle 1.9 as a teacher with your classes and are keen to make the most of the latest version? Or perhaps you are a Moodle admin who wants to check if you are ready to upgrade or maybe you want to ensure that you're able to help your tutors get to grips with the changeover?
This chapter will give you a few teasers of what's to come. Subsequent chapters will go into greater depth in order to prepare you for the Moodle 2.0 experience. From a learning and teaching point of view, rest assured that the object-oriented approach that makes Moodle so flexible is still solid in Moodle 2.0. In fact, there are even more ways to tailor your content to suit your learners, as we shall see in Chapter 6, Managing the Learning Path From an Administrator's point of view, role complexities have been tidied up, file uploads have been rationalized and Moodle 2.0 connects usefully with the best of the Open Web. While each chapter will point to new admin features where appropriate, Chapter 8, Admin Issues will focus on them more specifically. So what kind of thing can we expect? Let's take a tour!