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Education Management with Moodle: The Beginning, Middle, and Today

Moodle is the de facto standard in open source learning management systems. It is described as "a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments." Plus, Moodle is free software, licensed under the GPL. Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder and lead developer, generously took time from his busy schedule to have a good, long talk with me about why he created it, where it is today, and what's next in open education. First let me give you a little background. I was introduced to Moodle in 2005 while visiting a public school district in Portland, Oregon, which was using Moodle as part of their instructional delivery...

Open Source Dependency Management As A Balancing Act

During my career I have spent a lot of time packaging other people's code, writing my own, and working on large software frameworks. I have seen projects that still haven't released a stable version, never quite hitting 1.0, while others made 1.0 releases within months of beginning development, and then quickly moving on to 2.0, 3.0, etc. There is quite a variance in these release cycles, and this coupled with maintaining large projects can make things difficult. I will go through some of the decisions we have faced in projects I have worked on and the pressures on the project. On the one extreme, users would like to have a stable API that never changes, with dependencies that don't specify a minimum version so that they can choose whatever version works best...