One of my readers sent me the following graph the other day, so I figured since Moodle HQ likes numbers so much, I would post these for the disciples to consider. Now any artist will tell you “A picture is worth a thousand words”…so, what does that picture say to you?
Maybe it’s saying something like this….
Over the summer, many Moodle admins decided it was finally safe to upgrade from 1.6 to 1.9…everything seemed to go well. Now it’s September, the teachers are back, and are discovering all the roles related problems. The administrators realize that they can’t fix the problems because they don’t understand roles, so they post to moodle.org. Then they discover nobody, not even the developers who developed them, understands them either…this becomes painfully clear by the lack of response to their cries for help in the forums. Of course, moodle partners, like all good business people, see this as an opportunity and, well, you can guess the rest.
There is also another very interesting transformation happening in the moodle.org forums directly related to these roles issues. As someone who has been following the discussion forums and the development of Moodle for the past few years, I can’t help but notice how the Moodle development has shifted from a teaching/learning focus to an administration focus and nearly all the discussion in the forums now revolve around administration issues. Moodle.org now looks more like a set of discussion forums for a student management system than a learning management system.
Think about it…since Moodle 1.5 what teaching-learning tool improvements have been made in Moodle?
– Let’s see…you’ve lost workshop, exercise, and journal.
– You’ve lost significant ability to manage and configure your discussion forums since many of the most important forum settings have been moved to role overrides…and we know, allowing teachers to override roles is “very dangerous”.
– The forums themselves, have had no added functionality since 1.5…you’ve only lost functionality since the implementation of roles.
–The Wiki is still useless…no better illustration of that than the fact that moodle.org chooses to use MediaWiki instead of its own wiki.
– The moodle blogs haven’t been improved since they were implemented and they are so bad, that when a Moodle Partner finally started a bog, he started one on Blogger.
– There have been no improvements, or even changes, to Chat since it was implemented. Still no way for the teacher to do simple things like make their own name show in a different color-font size so they can be distinguished from others in a chat. Not to mention features like you have in skype rooms. I’ll bet you think Moodle developers use chat for their own developer meetings don’t you? Wrong…they don’t even use Moodle for those online meetings.
– In short, there have been no major additions to the teaching-learning tool set in Moodle and no major improvements to the teaching-learning tools since version 1.5.
What has changed since Moodle 1.5?
– In 1.6 you got unicode.
– In 1.7 you got Flexible Roles and Capabilities and a completely broken Moodle system.
– In 1.8 you got a recovery from the disaster that was 1.7. Now Moodle actually, sort of, worked again.
– In 1.9 you got a gradebook that is just about as complicated as roles. And, the site administration block has grown to at least four times the size it was in 1.6 with an ever increasing set of complicated ”admin checkboxes and drop-downs”.
– So, in short, virtually all the development since 1.5 has been in the areas of administration, management, testing, and grading. Not exactly a social constructivist/constructionist focus, wouldn’t you say?
The trend seems pretty clear to me…the bun (admin stuff) keeps growing and the beef (teaching-learning stuff) keeps shrinking. Makes one ponder the famous question:
Where’s the Beef?
Hummm…now that I think about it…this sounds like a “Frances Issue” doesn’t it? Wouldn’t be surprised to see this pop-up in the “lounge” and generate a whopping three thoughtful responses from disciples 
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