Designing MoodleNet to meet the needs of the Moodle community

By Doug Belshaw, Product Manager of MoodleNet

MoodleNet is our new open social media platform for educators, focused on professional development and the sharing of openly-licensed resources. As it will be an integral part of the Moodle ecosystem, we’ve designed it for our very large and diverse Moodle community.

Let’s explore that further!

 

MoodleNet fits into our mission of “empowering educators”. As we learned in the previous post in this series, MoodleNet is a federated system of independent communities that join together to make a network. These communities are spaces for the sharing of openly-licensed resources, and also for professional, pedagogical discussion.

With over 175 million members, the Moodle community is a large and diverse one! As such, when we were designing MoodleNet, we had to ensure that we were representing a range of needs and desires. After plenty of research, surveys, and in-depth meetings, we came up with a series of user personas to represent the goals and behaviours of our community.

From there, we used the Strategyzer Value Proposition Design (VPD) approach, to think through the value of MoodleNet in each particular context. Below you can find the results of this design thinking. If you want to see each of the personas in more detail, take a look at our MoodleNet white paper.

Educators

MoodleNet helps educators who want to find high quality teaching and learning resources because it enables them to discuss and curate resources from around the web. (Unlike randomly searching Google.)

 

 

Learning Technologists

MoodleNet helps learning technologists who want to encourage colleagues to use more technology by connecting them with like-minded peers and providing them with resources that are of immediate use. (Unlike endlessly searching OER repositories.)

 

 

 

System Administrators

MoodleNet helps system administrators who want to allow their colleagues to share (appropriate and legal) resources, both internally and with peers worldwide. MoodleNet provides an easy-to-deploy, secure, scalable system and a dashboard that provides administrators with insights. (Unlike a locked-down repository for sharing resources only within their organisation.)

 

 

 

Trainers and teaching assistants

MoodleNet helps trainers and teaching assistants who want to create and showcase their courses. By incentivising them to create openly-licensed resources, MoodleNet also enables them to create a professional profile showing their achievements. (Unlike using several social and professional networks in an attempt to create the same effect.)

 

 

The feedback that we’ve had so far on MoodleNet has been overwhelmingly positive. We’ve greatly appreciated the questions and comments received during workshops, webinars, and on blog/forum posts. In fact, around six months ago we decided to reimagine the whole user interface of MoodleNet, based on some of this feedback.

It won’t be long before MoodleNet is ready for you to try for yourself! If you are interested in this project, then please take a look at the options below.

 

Get involved!

• Click here to be notified when we’re ready for public sign-ups on the Moodle HQ-run MoodleNet instance. 
• Alternatively, if you or your organisation have the technical knowledge to be part of our federation testing programme, please follow the instructions inthis blog post.
• If you would like to be involved in localisation efforts, please check out our repositories onTransifex. For code contributions, see our repositories onGitLab.

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Do you want to know about MoodleNet? Follow the team’s updates atblog.moodle.net