PAPER: An overview of online education with Moodle

BIOGRAPHY:
Martin Dougiamas (1969), the lead developer of Moodle, lives in Perth Australia and is a prominent educator and computer scientist with postgraduate degrees in Computer Science and Education. His work has made a significant impact on the implementation of constructivist models of teaching and learning online with Moodle, a Course Management System.

He started his work in 1986 on early Internet and web applications at Curtin University, Australia, and is now a notable alumnus. Today, his main mission in life is Moodle. He started it in 1999 out of frustration with the existing commercial software at the time. Since then the project has been growing exponentially in terms of size and activity. This developed into Moodle - Martin Dougiamas is a key founder and lead developer of the Moodle.Org community and Executive Director of Moodle Pty Ltd.

His current research interests and inspiration are the application of social constructionist referents and networking to Internet technology, and the methodologies and practices of open-source software development. Currently, he is conducting his doctoral PhD research entitled "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry".

He has influenced community as a significant proponent and keynote speaker at conferences of constructivism, especially in view of the clash between Internet web2.0 technologies, learning theory and ICT in the classroom. His software and findings that now underpin the current models of learning online are currently used by the Open University and many other educational institutions. His open source software has been adopted by over 40.000 sites worldwide and translated into over 70 language versions. Currently, he is an advisory group member of eXe International, developing free authoring applications to help teachers and academics publish web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup code.