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Dublin City University, in collaboration with Tipperary Institute and the Irish Learning Technology Association (ILTA), hosted the first Irish Moodle Conference (Moodle Moot) on Friday 10 September 2004. There is an international community of Moodle users who meet online to exchange ideas on how moodle can be used and flag potential moodle developments - http://www.moodle.org. This international community has started to hold meetings, called a MoodleMoot. The first was hosted in Oxford in July of this year. http://www.oxilp.ac.uk/moodlemoot_04/

Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) - a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses and activities beyond the confines of the classroom. DCU's strategic plan states that "the University will be an innovator in the development and use of learning technology in course delivery". DCU examined both commercial and open source e-learning platforms. DCU choose the flexible open source e-learning platform called Moodle. In February 2003, following an extensive evaluation of a number of candidate platforms, DCU made an institutional commitment to the central administration and support of the Moodle open source Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). An initial deployment of Moodle was carried during the 2003/2004 academic year.

The functions of Moodle can be amended in order to facilitate the differing teaching styles and requirements of academics, another motivation for Moodle's adoption. Moodle is Open Source software which means that users are free to download it, use it, modify it and even distribute it (under the terms of the GNU General Public License). A new version of Moodle is released on average every three months incorporating innovative developments in the use of Moodle. The initial experience at DCU with Moodle has been very encouraging. The system is technically robust, reliable, and easy to use for both staff and students. The global community of Moodle users is extremely active, and growing quickly.

During 2003/2004 a number of innovative new pedagogical tools have been developed in-house, or have been commissioned externally. They are in the final stages of testing and it is hoped that many of these projects will be integrated into main Moodle release, thus benefiting the Moodle global community of users. DCU will showcases its use of Moodle, including two projects, one on the development of voice functionality on a discussion forum for language students and second the extension of the groups functionality.

The original developer of Moodle, Martin Dougimas, spoke about the future use of Moodle live from Australia via a video link. Dr Howard Miller from GUIDE, delivered the keynote speech (http://www.gla.ac.uk/guide/) and also announced publicly for the first time that the University of Glasgow have just committed themselves to a centrally supported, university wide, Moodle deployment. This is very significant to DCU as it is the first major, University level, enterprise Moodle adoption in the UK, and therefore strongly vindicates DCU's decision to adopt Moodle. Conference proceedings and archived video streamed can be found at http://www.moodle.ie.

Alternatively enquiries can be to Jennifer Burke or Morag Munro on 01 700 8353/5606