Málfríður - 15.03.2007, Blaðsíða 24

 MÁLFRÍÐUR
COVCELL stands for Cohort­Oriented Virtual
Campus for Effective Language Learning, picking
up each of the key elements of the application
mentioned above: the ultimate aim of “effective
language learning” in an on­line environment; the
importance of a seamless community of on­site and
off­site learners (“virtual campus”) and the peda­
gogically­motivated need for social support groups
of collaborating learners (“cohort­oriented”).
2.2 Open Source
Open Source means that the programming code of a
system is open for anyone to copy, use and modify
under certain very general conditions rather than
being the protected private property of an individual
or organisation (as is the source code for Microsoft
Windows for example). The general conditions that
do apply to the code are intended to guarantee its
continuing openness: those that use the code must
agree to make their own code open and accessible
to others under the same licence as the original code
(and not to change the original licence). An open
source system therefore allows individuals and gro­
ups to work together on developing solutions that
meet their needs without problems of licensing.
The Covcell Project would have had the option of
building its own learning management system from
scratch. This would have been a necessary choice if no
open source learning management system was avail­
able that addressed our needs. However, there are
now several learning management systems which are
open source. We believe that building a new learning
management system from scratch under these cir­
cumstances would be a waste of resources, as many
aspects of the basic architecture of the system that
we would need to build are not directly related to
our aims in the field of language learning and teach­
ing; we would therefore simply be reduplicating the
efforts of others without making progress towards
our specific aims. Further, the Covcell Project is only
a two­year project with relatively limited funding
– the funds we have are best spent developing par­
ticular tools rather than a full system.
In keeping with the open source philosophy, we
are therefore taking the tools which others have
developed, refining and extending them to meet
our own needs, and sending the results back to the
community for others to adopt and adapt according
to their needs.
2.3 Choosing Moodle
Moodle was a natural choice for the Covcell Project.
It is explicitly grounded in a social constructivist
philosophy. It is an open source system. It has a flex­
ible modular design which means that alterations
can often be made to one component of the system
without having to adapt other modules of the
system. At the front­end, activities and information
are usually presented as individual modules and
blocks that can be installed and adapted separately.
As will become clear below, its social constructivist
approach means that it is already richly endowed
with tools that support our aims. Covcell activities
can therefore be focused on developing and extend­
ing these possibilities to meet our needs.
The Moodle name points both to the constructiv­
ist and to the open source philosophy. Moodle itself
is an acronym:
“The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular
Object­Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is
mostly useful to programmers and education theorists.”
(http://docs.moodle.org/en/About_Moodle, accessed 14th
March 2007)
This acronym points to the formal aspects of the
Moodle architecture. However, there is also a less
serious association:
“It‘s also a verb that describes the process of lazily meander­
ing through something, doing things as it occurs to you to
do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight
and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle
was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might
approach studying or teaching an online course.” (http://
docs.moodle.org/en/About_Moodle, accessed 14th March
2007)
This notion of spontaneous investigation and curio­
sity is a key element in the constructivist charac­
terisation of effective learning.
Our positive assessment of Moodle received unex­
pected and substantial support in November 2005
when the Open University (UK) announced that it
would be adopting Moodle as the basis for future
developments of its virtual learning environment
and issued a report (The Open University (2005))
comparing four open­source learning management
systems: Moodle, Sakai, ATutor and Boddington.
The report (p. 10) adopts the Business Readiness
Rating framework as the basis of its assessment:
“The Architecture Project Team leader has evalu­
ated four leading open source VLE systems using
the Business Readiness Rating (BRR) framework.
Business Readiness Rating™ (BRR) is being pro­
posed as a new standard model for rating open
source software. It is intended to enable open source
software enterprise adopters and developers to rate
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