Moodle, Sloodle, Second Life?

I’m at the 2008 MERLOT Conference in Minneapolis this week so Okie Funk will be bringing you the recent developments in online higher education in the next two or three posts. I’ll get back to politics—though it has been increasingly difficult to separate educational issues from politics under the President George Bush administration—next week.

MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The organization helps college professors and instructors incorporate new technologies in their online and onground classes in a variety of ways. It serves as a clearing house for technology-related learning objects and resources. It publishes JOLT (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching). It also holds annual conferences that bring together educational technologists from around the world. It works in conjunction with leading universities and major technology companies.

In the past, I have given presentations at MERLOT related, in part, to the larger implications of how we empower students in online classes to create Web-based knowledge centers or learning objects. A pressing need, as I see it, is to develop academic systems and protocols—big and small—to generate more content-oriented Web material and digital texts as more and more students take online courses.

This year, my presentation is more pragmatic. I’m scheduled to give a three-hour workshop Thursday on the course manage system Moodle, which is based on open source programming. Moodle is a widely popular course management system that allows professors to teach online or supplement their regular onground classes. I use Moodle in my own courses.

Open source programming is a system of free—that’s right FREE—scripts that are essentially based on the computer language of php and its interaction with databases. Moodle is one of the most popular scripts, which is used by millions of students and faculty. One of the most important aspects of Moodle and other open source scripts is that developers/professors can modify and improve particular systems, and then, if significant, these improvements become part of the main script.

But the focus of my workshop is more pragmatic. How do you create a course and teach on Moodle? How do you add discussion forums and wikis? How do you create exams? How do you keep a grade book on Moodle that allows individual students to view their progress in particular courses?

There is also a major workshop exploring the use of Second Life in educational systems. I have tentatively tried to engage my students with learning opportunities on Second Life, and interest is quickly growing. Moodle now has a connector, titled Sloodle, which allows the two systems to work together. Some universities, including the University of Texas, now offer courses on Second Life. Second Life’s growing popularity as an educational site is one of the hottest issues in online higher education right now.

Here’s the description about the Second Life workshop:

“Communities of Practice emerging in 3D Virtual Worlds such as Second Life are creating learning experiences heretofore unavailable to teachers and learners. The SaLamander Project at The University of Oregon is a MERLOT Community with a mission to collaborate, find, index, and discuss aspects of the 3D Virtual World "Second Life" that have educational value and share in the research, development, and training opportunities associated with those factors. This workshop requires that participants feel reasonably comfortable navigating in SL.”

Are we ready for the future of online education?