Open Education: A perspective of Moodle and MOOCs. Talk delivered by Ravi Murugesan on 12 Nov 2016 at OpenCon 2016 Ranchi event.

1. Open education: A perspective
on Moodle and MOOCs
OpenCon Ranchi
12 November 2016
Ravi Murugesan

2. About me
• Work for AuthorAID, a non-profit programme that supports
developing country researchers in publishing their work
• Part of INASP, a charity in the UK
• Site administrator, course creator, and online facilitator on
INASP Moodle
• Facilitated MOOCs in scientific research writing

3. MOOCs
• MOOC: Massive open online course
• edX, Coursera, FutureLearn
• Technology, partnerships, top universities
• MOOCs as neo-colonialism?

5. From MOOCs to open education
• What is open education?
• Learners can access content and courses free of cost and from anywhere – is
that it?
• What about the supply side of open education?
• Is it only the prerogative of the select or elite few to offer content and
courses?

6. My view of open education
• It’s not about the content
• Google + digital literacy/information skills = get the content you want and filter out what is
dubious, biased or irrelevant. Simple!
• Open education is about the learning experience
• Content PLUS
• Learning activities
• Support, guidance, feedback, etc.
• Everything contextualised for the learner
• Open education should be geographically balanced on both the supply side and
demand side
• Should not be only about the elite educating the underprivileged

7. Moodle
• Open source learning management system (LMS), or virtual learning
environment (VLE)
• Licensed under GNU General Public License
• Free to use and adapt
• Installed on a server (hosting costs, technical expertise)

8. What can you do with Moodle?
(https://docs.moodle.org/31/en/Pedagogy)
“The heart of Moodle is courses that contain activities and resources.
There are about 20 different types of activities available (forums,
glossaries, wikis, assignments, quizzes, choices (polls), SCORM players,
databases etc) and each can be customised quite a lot. The main power
of this activity-based model comes in combining the activities into
sequences and groups, which can help you guide participants through
learning paths. Thus, each activity can build on the outcomes of
previous ones.”

9. Moodle and MOOCs
• Moodle is a great platform to run a MOOC
• I’ve facilitated MOOCs on Moodle for up to 3000 learners
• With Moodle anyone can run an online course
• But what about instructional design, content quality, Moodle
course creation expertise, teacher aptitude for online facilitation,
etc.?
• “With great power (and flexibility) comes great responsibility”

10. Thank you
Ravi Murugesan
ravi@uwalumni.com