Martin Dougiamas

Martin Dougiamas
File:Martin Dougiamas 2010.png
Born	August 1969
Website	http://dougiamas.com

Martin Dougiamas (born August 1969), lives in Perth, Australia and is an educator and computer scientist with postgraduate degrees in Computer Science and Education. He has worked on constructivist models of teaching and learning online, and developed the Moodle Course Management System.

Early years

While studying for a master’s degree and Ph.D. at Curtin University Australia, Dougiamas began developing the set of online tools that would become Moodle.

Research and theories

Dougiamas's PhD thesis is entitled "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry". He developed Moodle. He is still a lead developer of the Moodle.Org community and Executive Director of Moodle Pty Ltd.

Influence

The Moodle Web site said that were 64,761 currently active sites that have registered from 222 countries.

Patent Office claim

Martin was involved with revocation by the US Patent Office of a patent claim "Internet-based education support system and methods" (U.S. 6988138) submitted by Blackboard. The application described an Internet system in which different access rights to various course management resources can be granted to different users.

He has been called by Brent Simpson "one of the rare instances in Open Source software development where the right person with the right personality appears at exactly the right time; Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the LMS world and his software is the Linux of this software."

Writings

• Dougiamas, M. and Taylor, P.C. (2003) Moodle: Using Learning Communities to Create an Open Source Course Management System. Proceedings of the EDMEDIA 2003 Conference, Honolulu, Hawaii.
• Dougiamas, M. and Taylor, P.C. (2002) Interpretive analysis of an internet-based course constructed using a new courseware tool called Moodle. Proceedings of the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) 2002 Conference, Perth, Western Australia.
• Taylor, P.C., Maor, D. & Dougiamas, M. (2001) Monitoring the Development of a Professional Community of Reflective Inquiry via the World Wide Web, Teaching and Learning Forum 2001, Curtin University of Technology, February 2001
• Dougiamas, M. and Taylor, P.C. (2000) Improving the effectiveness of tools for Internet-based education, Teaching and Learning Forum 2000, Curtin University of Technology.
• Fairholme, E., Dougiamas, M. and Dreher, H. (2000) Using on-line journals to stimulate reflective thinking, Teaching and Learning Forum 2000, Curtin University of Technology.
• Dougiamas, M. (1992) Data-Driven Reconstruction of Planar Surfaces from Range Images, Computer Science Honours Dissertation, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia.

External links

• Writings, research papers and home page
• Moodle.org