User:Iamwretched/martin-dougiamas2

Martin Dougiamas is an educator, computer scientist and entrepreneur who lives in Perth, Australia. He has worked on social constructionist models of teaching and learning online, and since its first stable release in August 2002 has led the development of the open source Moodle learning platform, which is currently one of the most widely used learning management systems (LMS) in the world. Dougiamas is the founder and CEO of Moodle Pty Ltd, the company that drives development of Moodle. The Moodle project is backed up by a large online community.

Early years
As a child Dougiamas lived for some years in the desert of Western Australia, as the only white child in an aboriginal community and studied "online" via shortwave radio and through correspondence materials dropped off by aeroplane. His family moved to Perth and he attended Balcatta Senior High School in the city's northern suburbs.

Research and influence
While studying for a master's degree and PhD at Curtin University, Australia, Dougiamas began developing the set of online tools that would become Moodle. Dougiamas's PhD thesis project was titled "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry". Originally Moodle was an experimental platform for his PhD research but the widespread adoption of Moodle led him to focus on development of his platform rather than academic research.

Dougiamas is a defender of open-source software and has been involved in open-source advocacy. He was active in the revocation by the US Patent and Trademark Office of the patent claim for "Internet-based education support system and methods", granted to Blackboard on 17 January 2006. The patent established Blackboard's claims to certain features of course management systems. The Software Freedom Law Center filed a request on behalf of ATutor, Sakai and Moodle with the U.S. Patent Office to re-examine Blackboard's patent in November 2006, and in January 2007 the request was approved on the basis of prior art cited by the Center raising "substantial" questions. In 2010 Blackboard finally abandoned its appeals and terminated its patent claim.

In 2019, Dougiamas launched the Open EdTech Global initiative to bring together those interested in developing a completely open set of components to support all aspects of education.

Recognition
In 2008 Dougiamas was the winner of the Google-O'Reilly Open Source Award in the Education Enabler category. In 2016 Dougiamas was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia "for his contribution to open-source software through his leadership of the Moodle platform". In 2018 Dougiamas was awarded an honorary doctorate at the Université catholique de Louvain.

Publications

 * Olive, D. M., Huynh, D. Q., Reynolds, M., Dougiamas, M., & Wiese, D. (2019). A quest for a one-size-fits-all neural network: Early prediction of students at risk in online courses. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies, 12(2), 171-183.
 * Dougiamas. M. (2007 & 2014). Moodle: A Case Study In Sustainability. University of Oxford. (http://oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/cs-moodle. Retrieved on 18 August 2020.)
 * 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.
 * 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.