MOODLE

David Rutland moodles along with classroom management software on the LXF virtual private server and starts his own online course.

Credit: https://moodle.org

OUR EXPERT

David Rutland believes it’s impossible for a person to be either be overdressed or overeducated. People who know him agree that he is neither.

Education, education, education. If you were around in 1997, you probably remember the then soon-to-be Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s top three priorities for his first term in office.

Education is important. Developing young minds to be skilled in English, maths and the sciences means that as the current crop of youngsters grows to adulthood, you’ll be able to have informed and valuable conversations with them, civilisation will move forward propelled by their sharp intellects, and maybe they’ll even find a cure for our own rapidly ageing frames before it’s too late.

For seemingly endless chunks of the past two years, schools were closed, and pupils of all ages were forced to share stifled living space with furloughed parents and siblings for 23 hours every day. (I quite enjoyed it–ED)

Learning was remote, with video links, virtual learning spaces, YouTube video lecture sessions, and of course, Google classroom.

Google Classrooms

The choice of Google Classroom was a natural one for many schools. It enables teachers to manage multiple classes at once, juggle their timetables, and mark work directly within the browser. Even better, the fundamentals package is completely free. It’s ideal for schools on a budget.

The downsides are equally obvious. Educators are introducing children to a predatory, data-slurping megacorp at an early age, and by integrating its tools into the educational environment, teaching them that yes, big tech is their friend.

There are hundred of plugins available for Moodle, providing practically everything you could want in a virtual classroom.

Viewing a user profile while in an admin role gives you plenty of insight into student progress, grades, badges and more.

Few schools have competent IT departments these days, and most take the view that it’s infinitely easier to subscribe to a service such as Google Classroom than to maintain their own education and learning platform. Ignoring – in addition to privacy-related problems – the unfortunate fact that Google has an addiction to killing off its own services on a near-monthly basis.

We don’t know how many teachers are among the Linux Format readership, although we suspect there are more than a few school IT specialists. Online learning platforms aren’t limited to schools, and if you have a particular hobby in which you consider yourself an expert, there’s nothing to prevent you from creating a course – or even an entire online school, and administering it from the comfort of your very own VPS (virtual private server). Figure you know more about extreme couponing, frog dissection or dirt polishing? Here’s your opportunity to share that knowledge with the world in a structured and accountable way.