Early Years
Martin Dougiamas' primary school education was accomplished through an early form of what is now known as “distance learning." As a boy, he lived in the desert of Western Australia. As the only non-aboriginal child in a small settlement, he was enrolled in the Kalgoorlie School of the Air, which was located approximately a thousand kilometers from his home. He communicated via shortwave radio and every few weeks an airplane would drop off the necessary paperwork. The only time he saw his classmates was when they would all gather for an annual carnival. Reflecting on this experience, Dougiamas said “You learn to ‘widen the bandwidth’ that’s available to communicate through a narrow channel.”
Dougiamas started work in 1986 on early Internet and web applications at Curtin University, Australia. While helping faculty and staff use the Internet, he observed the many struggles that non-technicians had in utilizing online technology for teaching and learning. He also developed his own online course and improved its functionality over the years. When his university installed an early learning management system, called WebCT, he was frustrated that the software’s intellectual property restrictions prevented him from enhancing the system. This experience convinced him of the need for an open-source solution. Throughout the process of study and research for a master’s degree and Ph.D., Dougiamas began developing the set of online tools that would become Moodle.
Read more about this topic: Martin Dougiamas
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“Even today . . . experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years. . . . Children don’t need parents’ full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“When white men were willing to put their own offspring in the kitchen and corn field and allowed them to be sold into bondage as slaves and degraded them as another man’s slave, the retribution of wrath was hanging over this country and the South paid penance in four years of bloody war.”
—Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930)