 I give this presentation about Moodle. Well, Open Learn, which is the open courseware website that I look after, is based around Moodle. We built it from a baseline of the Moodle product and then extended. At the Open University here, we have one of the biggest Moodle development groups outside of Moodle HQ. In fact, we're bigger than Moodle HQ. There's about 20 of us here. So hopefully we know a fair amount about Moodle between us. And that's why I'm talking to you today. And what I'm going to do is run through the key features of the Moodle product and the things that we've changed and used and extended in order to make it suit open courseware sites so that hopefully you could do the same thing. Let's start with what is Moodle? So what is Moodle? Well, Moodle is an open source word management application. And I've pulled all of this information from the Moodle website. So hopefully I'm telling you exactly what the Moodle creators would like you to hear. The Moodle website is that URL at the bottom there, Moodle.org. And you can get all of this information there and much, much more. Moodle is a course management system. Some people refer to them as virtual learning environments or learning management systems. But essentially it's a tool for educators to create effective online learning sites. It follows what they call a social constructionist pedagogy, which I'm a technical developer, I'm not into pedagogy stuff, but I understand what that means is that people help each other to construct the knowledge through activities. Moodle is used by a wide range of companies. Everything from universities to primary schools and big business. There are tens of thousands of registered Moodle sites around the world. So the key Moodle features are that it's a simple, lightweight, low-tech interface for browsers for the users. The platform is easy to install on almost any PHP system. We run here on Apache and it supports all major database brands. Most people install with MySQL, but we run Postgres, and we're also investigating swapping over to Oracle because that's the OU's preferred database platform. You structure your course materials into course categories and courses, which can be blousable by guests and search engines or restricted, if you so choose. You can have thousands and thousands of courses on any one site. OpenLearn has 600 courses, which is relatively small. Our virtual learning environment has several thousands. You can cope with many, many visitors. OpenLearn has 10 million visitors in the last three years, mostly guests. But our virtual learning environment for students has a quarter of a million registered users. There's a flexible roles and permission system, which means that you can allow different people to do different things depending on their place in your system. You can allow guests to do different things than students, than teachers and so forth. Moderators, whatever else you need to set up. We have a key role for researchers, for example, so they can access lots of information about who's doing what to see how OpenCourseWare is being used. There are many, many interactive activities. The key ones, obviously, forums, wiki and blog. But there are a lot of tools, different tools that you can add in to make the learning experience much more interesting. The user interface can be switched on in a number of different languages. There are, I think, all my favorite languages available from MoodleHQ. Then you can also have the content in those different languages as well. The system is also extensible. If the core product doesn't give you what you want, there's a system of plugins that you can quite easily add in extra bits. There are lots that are already available out there. Let's have a look at what some of what I've just said actually looks like. This is a screenshot just from my development environment. There's a whole list of courses here. You can see from this screenshot the way that the courses are structured into categories. Arts and History, Business and Management, they're the categories. All those links underneath are the different courses. On the right-hand side, the smiley faces are the indication that the course is open to guests. The key on just one of them up the top there indicates that that's a private, restricted course. If you click on the I button, you get more information about the course, like a description of it. This screenshot is showing you how the roles and commissions work. This is something that people are often quite scared of at first with Moodle, because it is quite complicated because it's so flexible. In the bottom right-hand side there, you see the role list. Moodle comes with six core roles, administrator, course creator, teacher, menu editing teacher, learner and guest, and then you can define as many more as you want on top of that. From that little screen, you can just see where I've assigned a few people to different roles. A major part of this screenshot is showing you how you define a role. What you get is this huge long list of all the different things that you can do in a Moodle site, like manage payments and create activities. For each one of those individual tasks, you set whether someone is allowed or not allowed to do that thing. It's a time-continuing process to do that for every single role, but you only have to do it once, thank goodness. This is an example of the forums at Moodle headquarters.