MoodleNet whitepaper
Introduction
To ensure the aims and objectives of MoodleNet are understood by all parts of the Moodle community, we are putting together a white paper that will serve as a touchstone as the project develops.
A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body's philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision. (Wikipedia)
The intended audience for this white paper includes, but is not limited to: developers, educators, analysts, site administrators, and instructional designers. It will be written by Doug Belshaw, MoodleNet Lead, with input from staff at HQ as well as community members.
Access the latest version of the whitepaper on Google Docs
White paper
Overview
Project MoodleNet is described by Martin Dougiamas, Founder and CEO of Moodle as, "a new open social media platform for educators, focused on professional development and open content". It will be an integral part of the Moodle ecosystem.
To ensure the aims and objectives of Project MoodleNet are understood by all parts of the Moodle community, this white paper will serve as a touchstone as the project develops.
“A white paper is an authoritative report or guide that informs readers concisely about a complex issue and presents the issuing body's philosophy on the matter. It is meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.” (Wikipedia)
The primary audience for this white paper is the educators for whom Project MoodleNet is intended to help empower. It will also be of interest to content authors, instructional designers, learners, site administrators, analysts and developers. It is being put together by Doug Belshaw, Project MoodleNet Lead, with input from staff at HQ as well as community members.
Project MoodleNet: the what and the why
Introduction
Moodle is an award-winning international open source software project best known for a powerful online learning platform used by schools, higher education institutions and workplaces globally. The Moodle learning platform allows educators of any kind to create a private space online, filled with tools that easily creates courses and activities - all optimised for collaborative learning.
Moodle’s products are used by well-known organisations such as Cisco, The United Nations, and The Open University. They are also used in countless schools and smaller institutions who value the power and flexibility of open source software. Moodle’s products are managed by a dedicated team at Moodle HQ and international team members around the world. As an open source project it is supported by a strong global community of users and certified Partners.
Every instance of Moodle is a fully-featured, standalone learning platform. To date, the only Moodle-provided way for educators and other users to share content has been within their installation, backing up and importing activities, or by sharing entire courses. This white paper envisages ‘Project MoodleNet’, an upgrade to the latter connecting educators via a Moodle-provided open social media platform which focuses on professional development and open content.
This white paper is a non-technical introduction to Project MoodleNet, setting out the ‘why’ of the project: why it is needed, why it will be useful, and why it will be different from current systems used by educators.
Scenarios
To situate Project MoodleNet we will introduce some scenarios in which it might be used. The following personas are based on real users of Moodle and represent a variety of contexts for Project MoodleNet. We will revisit these scenarios towards the end of this white paper to demonstrate the value it may bring.
Scenario A: Teacher (K12)
Estrella is an Spanish educator living in Madrid who is new to Moodle. She’s 32, teaches at a local ESO (secondary) school, and leads a busy life. Although she has experience in using tools with more basic functionality, she needs to get up-to-speed with the wealth of options and features available in Moodle. Estrella needs to get her classes ready for the new year, and has become frustrated that she can find neither the resources she needs, nor quick answers to questions she has about setting up courses.
Scenario B: Lecturer (university)
Takeshi is a 37 year-old Japanese educator living in Kyoto who has been using Moodle for three years. During this time, he has collaborated with two other colleagues at his university to create course content. Takeshi has a strong desire to author educational content collaboratively with other members of the wider Moodle community and then share that content under an open license. This is both because he believes in the value of this to society and his profession, but also because he is looking to build his career and sees this as positive way of bringing attention to his work.
Scenario C: Trainer (workplace)
Bohdan is a naturalised Canadian trainer living in Vancouver and working for a large company who has an in-house elearning programme which makes use of Moodle. He’s 41 years of age and is new to Moodle, but experienced with other learning platforms. Bohdan seeks new innovative ways to enhance learning with Moodle tools and has found a small group of colleagues in the UK and India with whom he interacts via Twitter. Ideally, he’d like to extend and enhance this network in a way that wasn’t quite so public.
Scenario D: Learning Technologist (college)
Seung is a 26 year-old Australian who is a Learning Technologist at a college in Melbourne. She is motivated to help her colleagues use Moodle more effectively, and wants to connect with other Learning Technologists to discover promising practices in this area. Seung feels a little isolated, although she has found some contacts via the Moodle forums and LinkedIn. Ideally, she would like to have a strong network of peers who are in a similar position to her in other institutions.
Scenario E: Teaching Assistant (K12)
Lúcio is a Teaching Assistant with no technical background. He’s 21, and lives in Manaus, Brazil. Lúcio has been asked to help provide support to students on his school’s Moodle Cloud site and so needs to get up-to-speed on moderation and other features. He has scoured the Moodle discussion forums and read as much as he can, but he has only a basic grasp of English so could do with a helping hand. Lúcio’s school is poorly-funded, and he is not sure where to turn or what to do next.
Scenario F: Programme Co-ordinator (university)
Ammaarah is a 52 year-old Programme Co-ordinator living in Soweto, South Africa and working in a university. She has a deep experience of Moodle and other open source software projects. Over the years, Ammaarah has created and sustained a successful local Moodle Hub which takes up much of her time. She has a vision of connecting her localised Moodle Hub to a worldwide resource sharing network for two-way resource discovery, but never quite has the time to figure out how to do this. Ammaarah is keen to reduce the burden of administration and custom development for both herself and her team, but does not want to compromise on her vision.
What is Project MoodleNet?
Moodle’s mission is to empower educators to improve our world. With Project MoodleNet, we intend to fulfil that mission by creating what Martin Dougiamas has described as “a new open social media platform for educators, focussed on professional development and open content”.
It is envisaged that Project MoodleNet will contain features such as the following, listed in suggested order of development:
- Identity and reputation: to empower educators to develop their public profile
- Messaging: to empower educators to connect with each other
- News feed: to empower educators to keep up-to-date
- Access to openly-licensed resources: to empower educators to share with one another
- Crowdfunding: to empower educators to be supported in their work
The following sections give more detail about these proposed core features of Project MoodleNet.
1. Identity and reputation
Educators are used to making do with a mixed-economy of tools and services with which to go about their job. On a day-to-day basis they may use some or all of the following:
- Learning platform - to interact with students during the school day and for blended learning activities.
- Email - to interact with their colleagues.
- Social networks - to keep up to date with news and the latest developments in their sector.
The assumption when using these tools and services is that any difficulties or problems a user experiences are primarily technical in nature. However, although this may often be true, some of the issues a user may experience can be the result of one-size-fits-all design decisions around identity.
Identity
Identity is prismatic, which has an impact on how we express and share online. As humans, our online identity is less like looking in a mirror and more like the facets of a diamond. Who you share as makes a difference to the quality and nature of the kinds of interaction you can have online. Being able to choose the identity you share as therefore has an impact on the quality of professional discourse and debate.
“Complexity in identity is what defines our humanity.” (Chris Poole)
Social networks such Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn consider you to have a single identity that works in every context. Their platforms therefore insist on users creating a single account featuring their ‘real’ name. We know from everyday experience, however, that we act differently in various contexts. The way we act professionally as an employee or freelancer is different to the way we would act as a husband, daughter, brother, or friend.
“Identities are not fixed or static. As social theorists have been telling us for years, we are actively involved in constructing fluid, plural and hybrid identities by combining a range of different building materials, resources and representations that are available to us. Our identities constantly need to be assembled, something like IKEA flat-pack furniture or Lego construction kits.” (Ben Williamson)
Other social networks, such as Twitter and Instagram, allow users to run multiple accounts which go some way to satisfying our desire to share and express ourselves in different ways. For example, an educator may have a professional account where they share information about their courses, providing information to students, parents, and their colleagues. They may also have a personal account which is perhaps more locked down, where they express their political views. If they have access to a shared organisational account, they may be trusted to also share updates in the style and tone expected by that audience.
Despite this difference around multiple accounts, there are at least three things the major social networks have in common:
- Paid for by attention and data - although ‘free’ at the point of access for users, proprietary, advertising-based social networks monetise the attention of users and their usage data.
- Tend towards centralisation - whether for reasons of ease of use or to ensure maximum shareholder value, proprietary, advertising-based social networks limit the ability of third-parties to develop tools that add new functionality and features.
- Privatisation of public spaces - while there is a veneer of proprietary, advertising-based social networks providing ‘public’ spaces for discourse, the amount of information available to the open web is shrinking, and the company that owns the network has absolute control over participation within it.
Pushing back against this is a range of decentralised social networks, such as Diaspora*, Mastodon, and Synereo which attempt to put control back into the hands of users. With Mastodon, for example, users choose to join a particular instance based on affinity group or serendipity. Their updates are shared with their instance but can also be ‘federated’ to the wider network of Mastodon servers and, indeed, any system based upon the protocol that underpins it.
The value of decentralised networks is that, while technical interoperability must be maintained for updates to be federated, connecting together instances allows for a flourishing of local context and colour. Mastodon provides options to the user to choose an instance based on, for example: the language(s) that you speak; the number of people on the instance; whether or not they allow advertising and/or NSFW content; and even whether you can co-own the instance.
Identity within decentralised networks depends upon the context in which an individual chooses to engage with the wider ‘fediverse’. Sending out an update to the wider network from an address at witches.town (“a nice place on Mastodon for queer, feminists, anarchists and stuff as well as their sympathizers”), for example, is likely to be composed, received and understood differently than a similar update sent from an address at scholar.social (“an instance for researchers, teachers and students at all levels, one that you can be proud to put on the last slide of a presentation at a conference.”). It is, of course, entirely conceivable in this example that the same individual may be actively posting from separate accounts on each instance.
Recommendation #1: Project MoodleNet should allow users to create and manage multiple accounts. Serious thought should be given as to the possibility of allowing some interactions to be anonymous, or pseudo-anonymous.
Recommendation #2: Although easy to join and use, Project MoodleNet should be a robust, decentralised, federated system that does not have a single point of failure.
Recommendation #3: Project MoodleNet should put the user in control of all of her data. All data held about a user should be compliant with the terms of the GDPR and be removable from the system. Users should be given fine-grained controls over who can see personal data and information they have added.
