Section outline

Martin Dougiamas (remote presentation)

Founder and lead developer of Moodle

Title: Feedback

Feedback is one of the universal laws of education. I will be discussing how it works and how you can use it to design your education program.

Shoji Kajita, Ph. D

IT Planning Office, Institute for Information Management and Communication, Kyoto University

Title: The History and the Development of LMS: Current Status and Challenges of New Teaching and Learning Environment Redefined by Commoditized Learning Management System

Learning Management System (LMS), which is also referred to as ‘Course Management System’ (CMS) from a teaching viewpoint, had rapidly gained popularity since around 1998, and has become commoditized in higher educational institutions (especially in north American institutions). Although Japanese higher educational institutions are almost ten years behind, the LMS/CMS has also penetrated into the Japanese teaching and learning environment, and we have seen an increasing number of use cases unbounded to PC terminal rooms such as MOOC and Flipped Classroom, due to the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. As a result, it is becoming more important to integrate learning spaces in the cyber world and those in the physical world. This talk addresses the current status and challenges of new teaching and learning environment in the commoditized LMS/CMS.

Marina Glancy

Development Process Manager, Moodle Head Quarters

Title: What Does 'Open-source' and 'Community-driven' Mean for Moodle Development?

When you start working with Moodle and explore it’s potential you might not even realise how many people were involved in the preparation of the final product. Thousands of users around the world participate not only in development but also in suggesting features, providing support, testing, translations and writing documentation for Moodle. In my presentation I will show many different ways of how Moodle users can actively participate in the product and how Moodle HQ organises these processes. Being open source makes code contributions much easier. By allowing everybody to take part in the code development, Moodle can satisfy the requirements of a broad user base and provide a wider set of features compared to boxed distributions developed by one team. This diversity of code can bring some disadvantages however, which I will also mention. I will cover what being open source means for security and how Moodle addresses it.