The future of education: Open, learner-centered and sustainable

Many years back, I discovered Moodle during an enriching educational journey to Portland, Oregon. As a passionate learner and educator, I was fascinated by a software package that seamlessly integrated various tools, fostering a dynamic environment for teaching, learning, and assessment. My enthusiasm for this free and Open Source learning management system led me to swiftly download and implement it in my school district. Over the subsequent years, I became a Moodle administrator and a Moodle resource teacher for our district. Eventually, I became a university student utilizing Moodle to pursue a master’s degree.

In my journey, I had the opportunity to delve into the world of Moodle and connect with its visionary creator, Martin Dougiamas. He’s not just a fascinating individual; he’s also a trailblazing thinker in the realm of education. Back in 2016, I interviewed him for an article on the current state of Moodle. Little did I know that this interaction would catapult me into the vibrant realm of open education.

Fast forward to earlier this year when the buzz about ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) gained traction in educational circles. Thanks to my prior engagement, I found myself on a mailing list dedicated to open education. The real surprise came when I received an invitation to participate in the Open Ed Tech discussion. This global conversation, hosted on Big Blue Button, brought together a diverse audience to explore the implications of this cutting-edge technology on education.

What truly delighted me was discovering that Dougiamas not only acknowledged this new wave of technology but saw it as a beacon of promise and opportunity for education. His perspective added an exciting layer to the ongoing dialogue about the future of learning.

The conference and subsequent talks that he gave at MoodleMoot in Barcelona, Spain in 2023 inspired me to ask him for another interview. He touches on the effects of online learning on the pandemic, artificial intelligence and the power of community. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Don Watkins: Why is “open”  the way forward in education?

Martin Dougiamas: Education has not ever been one method, it’s a practice that is very contextual and very cultural.  On the other hand, there are also a lot of advantages to interoperability, to prevent reinvention of educational artifacts and practices. 

Open Source, open standards and open practices in general allow for the perfect balance of worldwide sharing and the local customization/innovation needed in specific instances to make things work.

Educators and education institutions are generally where a lot of our Open Source has traditionally come from. It’s a very compatible mindset with a long tradition of academic research and sharing. 

OSNet: What is Open EdTech? How is Open EdTech part of the future of Moodle and education in general?

MD: Open EdTech is a new global association I founded around a central idea: Bringing together a large number of people working in educational technology to design a strong, long-term vision of educational infrastructure that’s open in every way possible, while also being future-proofed to fully utilize AI, artificial reality and future technologies.  It needs to be learner-centered, flexible enough to cope with any educational context, high-quality and able to support a good balance of standards and innovation from many players.

It came from my role as CEO of Moodle and thinking about the future of what Moodle should become in five- 10, 20, 30 years.  Moodle, as a learning management system, is only part of any EdTech solution and it became clear that this long-term vision should include a wide range of stakeholders who could then help to build it.

As Open EdTech develops, it can become a shared framework that companies like Moodle and many others can “build into,” first with integrations and later with completely new solutions that exist in this new ecosystem.

OSNet: “The best infrastructure we can build promotes equality and sustainability because these things were baked into their design.” How does Open Edtech accomplish that?

MD: Yes, that’s my quote from our vision page.  

First, on equality:  Our goal as we build out this design of this future is to make sure it includes everyone.  That means it needs to run on low-end devices, on slow internet, it needs to be very easy to use in every country and it needs to be completely Free.  Every learner on the planet needs to be included, if they want to, for life.  There are no advertising or subscription models here and there can be no compromise on that.

There may of course be some paid services in the ecosystem, but they must always be optional and the Association will always seek to pay for them through innovative funding models (e.g. redirecting a lot of education funding that currently goes to commercial companies.)

Sustainability is also critical.  I’ve had some experience here. Moodle currently directly hires 260 people to make our Open Source products (and supports thousands more) because we have created a lot of sustainable revenue sources around services.  As long as enough people are willing to pay for extra services that can be enough to fund the development of our Open Source software as a common good and achieve our mission.  There are way too many Open Source projects littering the internet because these models were not thought about enough.  As users, it’s important to know that the software we depend on is safe and ongoing.  And so of course, our vision work at OET includes sustainability as design criteria. 

OSNet: How is Moodle preparing for the future? What were the main effects of the pandemic boom? 

MD: Moodle has become a venerable and large Open Source project, and is still the most widely-used learning management system in the world.  For many who already were using Moodle, the pandemic just boosted what they were already doing, but we also saw a lot of new users who were “panicked” into online learning and often the rush meant it was not rolled out as well as it could have been. We were swamped with many discussions and opportunities from all over the world and tried to help as much as we could, with things like free hosting on MoodleCloud and free training on Moodle Academy. 

Moodle remains a “Lego set” of capabilities that make it adaptable and suited for building very customized learning platforms.  Similar to WordPress, our community continues developing new plugins that give the platform the features they need – there are over 2,100 plugins available at https://moodle.org/plugins

Our core roadmap covers a lot of different things, but the three broad themes are about unlocking creativity, facilitating collaboration and optimizing outcomes. Largely, each of the many small projects under these is evolutionary, not revolutionary, because of the sheer number of people who depend on the platform as it is. Moodle has a similar dynamic to an operating system, where change feels quite gradual. 

OSNet: How will generative AI change the way we teach and learn?

MD: I have two main answers to this very big question which I’ve been thinking hard about for the past few years since GPT2 and other machine-learning projects showed us that useful AI brains were finally here. In my view, this wave of AI technology is going to be more transformative for society than the Internet itself has been in the past 30 years.

First, when people need to learn something, they’re using the very same lump of brain that they’ve always had and a lot of the existing processes that we know work are always going to work.  Learning requires effort, and movement and brains need to focus and make that effort – there are no real shortcuts.  However, generative AI is becoming very useful in removing some of the tedious work: For example in generating, managing and transforming content and experiences; to help analyze reams of data and to generally save time and effort for everyone involved. The Moodle core teams and community have a lot of small projects around the learning management system (LMS) where AI is being employed as part of a plugin to do all kinds of smaller jobs like this. 

Secondly, in the long term, it’s clear that generative AI is the core of a complete wave of automation (both in software and in physical space through robots) that will affect every single facet of society.  In my view, we need to push for and plan for a future where automation can take care of a lot of everyone’s core needs.  If we can get it right, the entire concept that people need to work for a living can become a historical phase so learning doesn’t need to be oriented around job skills, plus we have much more time to learn new things.

I’m hoping (and designing) for this future – one where learning is more of an enjoyable intellectual pursuit, facilitated by a personal AI assistant who knows you intimately and seamlessly helps connect you to fun and interesting experiences.  I’m less interested in dedicated AI tutors, but I do think AI can connect people and machines in interesting new ways (for example, as already happens to an extent with great podcasters on YouTube’s recommendation algorithms… just imagine that expanding far beyond video and audio though and into AR.)

OSNet: What are the potential negative aspects of AI in the future of education?

MD: Some will employ AI to persuade and control and profit (in every field) and this will find its way into education as well.  Unfortunately, the particular commercial model of venture-capital-funded startups and all the particular pressures that causes is alive and well in the EdTech space – I’ve been fighting this with Moodle for decades already.  Now the startups are all AI-based and the playbook is the same but the power in the systems is larger and still dangerous because they usually all want to “win” the “market” and get the majority of people dependent on their proprietary centralized systems.  This introduces risks of all kinds.

Specifically with AI, the scariest thing is the ability for these systems to be used to generate untold amounts of believable-looking but untrue content.  Future generations are going to be awash in “fake news” to a degree we’ve never seen and trust in the internet will continue to fall, which affects learning. That’s why we need to work on building trustworthy sources of information – one of our Open EdTech projects is focused on how educational institutions can help to be part of the solution here.  MoodleNet, our open education resource (OER) project at Moodle, is also aimed squarely at this quality problem.  

OSNet: There’s pushback in brick-and-mortar schools about forcing students to write longhand in class so they can’t cheat at home using AI. How will that affect online learning? 

MD: One reason this is a problem is because a lot of our educational processes are not that great, with huge classes and poor engagement.  Large essays, for example, were always a problem for plagiarism, well before AI. I’ve always promoted smaller chunks in education so that the course becomes a flow of frequent feedback cycles. Online courses built like that are far less susceptible to plagiarism because everyone is deeply engaged in long-term communication (a good teacher in such a situation can predict what a given student will get in an essay.)   It’s much harder to cheat someone you’re in a good relationship with.

In the end, it comes down to making the brain do the work, so I’m all for whatever works. And in a likely automated world where learning is more about personal growth, I think offline experiences might just get more and more attractive and fun.

OSNet: Do we need a new model for learning that builds upon constructivist pedagogy impacted by AI?

MD: Probably not. For basic learning, the brain is still the brain (until brain-computer Interfaces become more common, at least!) and good learning (construction of knowledge) requires action and repetition. 

For lifelong learning, many people among us already live in this future reality.  Look at rich people and those who run organizations, they already live in a world where they are surrounded by assistants who take care of all the details, so they can focus on the big picture stuff and mostly just do their learning from high-level summaries and conversations with peers. This model works, and I think points the way to how everyone could live in a prosperous future (assuming we can make that happen.)

Have you used online open learning platforms at work or in school? We’d love to hear more about open learning from the frontlines. Get in touch.

Photo by Desola Lanre-Ologun on Unsplash