Last year we at Moodle HQ, along with our Moodle Partners and community members, ran the first MoodleMoot India 2017 in Mumbai.
With over 200 people attending, our first #MootIN17 was a hit and this year we are looking forward to working more with our event committee to make our MoodleMoot India 2018 bigger and better!
So, during the course of our event preparation last year, we had the opportunity to be supported by passionate Moodler, Farhan Karmali. You might have read Farhan’s interview post about MoodleMoot India 2017 but if you have not, you are in for a treat today!
We cross over to Mumbai, India, this Moodler’s Monday and talk more about Moodle with Farhan!
Moodle HQ: Farhan, thank you for taking the time to chat to us. Can you start by letting us know more about yourself and how you are involved with Moodle?
Farhan: Hi, thank you so much for having me here. It’s such a pleasure to be part of the wonderful community of Moodle.
I am primarily a Moodle developer and work at the Islamic Online University as Assistant head of IT services. My role involves Moodle development, customization, integration with other systems , devops, we are constantly working on how we can improve the service provided to students. I am also involved with many other companies as a Moodle consultant. I also teach computers and programming using Moodle. So my experience with Moodle involves development, administration as well as teaching.
I have been a part of the Moodle community since early 2011 and I am extremely passionate about Moodle, I take active part in the Moodle.org forums , I am the facilitator for Moodle in India forum, I have also started contributing bug fixes and improvements on the Moodle tracker and also help in the QA for Moodle releases.
Moodle HQ: As a passionate member of our MoodleMoot India event committee, you advocate for a more collaborative Moodle community in the country and more participation for Moodle’s presence in the region too.
How do you think Moodle can support the needs of educators and learners in India?
Farhan: Moodle is an amazing platform with a lot of potential to empower educators. Being open source, it is easily accessible to everyone. Today, India needs quality education to be available to everyone across the country and Moodle can help facilitate teachers to reach out to everyone. With the various tools and features that Moodle provides it enables educators to easily embrace e-Learning and move closer to “Digital India”. Moodles endeavour to constantly improve the Moodle mobile app helps learners all across the country, and the world , get access to quality education resources at their fingertips with minimal costs involved.
Many institutes in India hesitate to adopt e-Learning because of the heavy costs involved or the lack of proper training. Moodle is open source so it is extremely cost effective and it has a very large active community that is extremely helpful. We also have the LearnMoodle MOOC which can help educators get training about Moodle. Using Moodle can also help institutes streamline and digitize their processes to become even more efficient and eventually pass on benefits to the learners.
The MoodleMoot provides an excellent opportunity to connect with various Moodlers all across the country and work in a collaborative way to overcome the challenges and make Moodle adoption a success.
Moodle HQ: What do you think is needed – development, features, training, collaboration, projects, etc – to make sure that Moodle empower more educators to improve our world?
Farhan: Moodle is constantly being improved with new features being added all the time. Feedback from educators is extremely vital as that will help shape Moodle into an even more powerful learning management system. I really look forward to Project Moodle.Net as that will provide an excellent platform for educators to come together, share resources, and also for developers to take feedback and share their views.
I feel educators need more training and guidance, to utilise Moodle to its full potential , since Moodle is so vast and has so many features that are constantly evolving. This will also spread awareness about Moodle and increase adoption.
Moodle HQ: Lastly, how do you recommend people who are new to Moodle or is using Moodle contribute to the open source project globally and also specifically for the Moodle community in India?
Farhan: It’s very easy to contribute to Moodle as there is something there for everyone to be a part of this excellent open source project and the entire community is so welcoming. I personally started with the Moodle.org forums, where initially I used to ask a lot of questions and got great support to the point where I started giving back and eventually got awarded the particular helpful Moodler badge. There is a forum for everyone administrators, educators, server admins, developers etc.
You can also contribute to the Moodle docs wiki with user guides, development help and so much more.
Developers can take part in Moodle tracker by contributing patches for issues and others can vote , or comment with what they feel should be the right approach to solve the issue.
You can also help for Moodle QA testing in which you get to try the upcoming Moodle features and ensure the next version of Moodle is even more awesome.
Developers can also submit their plugins, themes so that the community can benefit from them.
In India especially , you can help by spreading awareness about Moodle , enabling institutes to embrace Moodle more readily. Spreading the word about the MoodleMoot India and getting more people to attend will eventually help increase Moodle use in India and empower educators.
Thank you for Farhan for taking the time to chat to us today!
Stay tuned for more opportunities to join the Moodle community in India, by following our updates on Twitter.
