Not your average tech bro: The boy from the bush behind a digital juggernaut

2 weeks ago 3

If you’re looking for an Australian equivalent of Silicon Valley’s tech supremos, it would have to be Martin Dougiamas. He’s an unlikely one, too – a Perth-based pioneer whose online-learning platform, Moodle, is used all over the world not only by educational institutions, including Oxford and Cambridge, but also by less likely-sounding users, including most branches of the US Department of Defence and US retail juggernaut Walmart.

The Open University of China uses it to bring education to its adult citizens nationwide, says Moodle’s 56-year-old creator. “It’s like an industrial model because they have 4.4 million students, have produced 9.5 million graduates and have a Moodle staff of 35.”

Dougiamas sounds pleased but not smug when he says this, a clear differentiation between America’s boastful “tech bro” types and this Australian man whose education began humbly with School of the Air lessons in the remote desert of Western Australia. These days he lives in the Perth hills, where the upstairs study light often burns through the night as he converses with Moodle co-design teams around the world. By day, he might be helping his neighbours revegetate a local stream or entertaining friends with his Singaporean-born wife Usha, a social worker.

Another striking difference between the tech-bro mentality and Dougiamas is his innate sense of the “fair go” – Moodle has not turned him into a multibillionaire because he never wanted to be one. He’s never sold the technology, although he’s had lucrative offers. Moodle was always intended to be a gift to learners, free to its global users.

Over time, Moodle has become the most widely used learning management system (LMS) in the world – including in the United States, Spain, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Germany, Colombia, Italy and India. Version 1.0 was first released in August 2002 and by February 2009 there were more than 620,000 registered users of Moodle from 204 countries, speaking more than 70 languages.

Dougiamas watching how Moodle is used in an Indian school.

A report last year recorded Moodle’s dominance over its LMS rivals. It found Moodle has the highest market share in Europe (71 per cent), Latin America (76 per cent), Middle East (77 per cent), Oceania (63 per cent) and Africa (79 per cent). “It shows the most consistent and largest share compared to other platforms globally,” the Higher Education LMS Market Dynamics report stated.

Moodle stands for “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment”; in simpler language, it is an open-source platform that allows individuals to create, manage and deliver educational courses and resources.

“We don’t do the content, we create the structure,” explains Dougiamas. “The analogy would be that Moodle is the digital campus, the online bricks and mortar of a school or university. We provide the right rooms, lecture theatre, whiteboards, drawers, desks. You walk into an empty building, and you decide how you’re going to use it – one student in one room, or 3 million people in another.”

‘[Dougiamas] didn’t go to a wealthy school or live in a mansion … The unique situation he came out of … helped him be humbler.’

Professor Michael Sankey, director of the Australasian Council for Open and Digital Education Dougiamas

Moodle is widely used within the US military, Dougiamas says, including the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Space Force, Homeland Security and Coastguard. “Moodle is installed on their computers and creates a website that they interact with. They might say, ‘Here’s a new helicopter and here’s a new online course to operate it.’ ”

Unlike other platforms, Moodle is free to its users – there is no licence fee or vendor lock-in (where a user is forced to continue using a product or service). Nor is Moodle’s business model funded by venture capitalists; Dougiamas has created a way of supporting his organisation’s research and development through a network of about 100 Moodle partner service companies. These “partners” deal with the installation, consulting and training of clients and they pay roughly 10 per cent of their revenue to Moodle HQ in return for registration, where they receive support and resources.

“I was being pulled so much into the support area that I couldn’t do research or work on the software,” Dougiamas says. He says a friend suggested setting up a partner program, so others could deal with the services side of the business, and “we do the software. I handed over all my clients [to the partner service companies] in 2004.”

These days, Dougiamas enjoys the freedom of heading up a small Moodle army of code developers. “Running a company was never my goal – we’re not profit-driven, the company is just there to manage the open-source project. We focus on creating a platform that can support the online education movement around the world. I’ve always been trying to [expand education opportunities through technology] – how do you do more and understand more?”

Dougiamas is a rare kind of tech bro, says Professor Michael Sankey, director of the ACODE (Australasian Council for Open and Digital Education) Learning Technologies Leadership Institute. “Martin has a kind of humility that we don’t see in too many people,” Sankey says. “He didn’t go to a wealthy school or live in a mansion in Toorak or Cottesloe Beach. It’s because of the unique situation he came out of that helped him be humbler.

“Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk want to be the wealthiest people in the world – the only way they get that money is from us transferring our money to them,” the professor says. “That is not Martin’s modus operandi. He wants to get in first and make [technology] free for people, at least in the education area. He democratises learning.”

Solitary childhood

A grainy snapshot from Dougiamas’ childhood reveals much about his start in life. It shows a toddler perched on a motorbike with his father on a vast pastoral station. Young Martin was raised in remote West Australian desert country, where his migrant parents had found work. Often he and his sister Katie were the only non-Aboriginal children for hundreds of kilometres. His mother, Maria, had arrived from Germany aged 16 in the 1960s. “Her large family had no idea what they were coming to,” says Dougiamas, “and Mum’s father brought machetes with him because he thought he was coming to a jungle.”

A young Dougiamas with his father in the remote WA outpost of Wingellina.

His father Alec was in his 20s when he came out on a six-week voyage, part of a migration wave from northern Greece: “He still follows the Greek news on a daily basis, but he loves Australia.” His parents met in a cinema in the goldmining town of Kalgoorlie, where Alec was working in the underground mine (now the open-cut Kalgoorlie Super Pit) and Maria was a nurse at Kalgoorlie hospital.

After the couple married, they were sent to the desert outpost of Wingellina, 1700 kilometres north-east of Perth, near the border of three states, where they were hired to build a mining camp from scratch. The children’s school was the Kalgoorlie School of the Air, 1000 kilometres to the south.

“We had a lofty antenna for communication and once a day, we’d connect on shortwave radio for an hour, the signal bouncing off the atmosphere to Kalgoorlie,” recalls Dougiamas. “A plane came every couple of weeks, a six-seater Cessna delivering mail and my school correspondence, so I mainly worked off papers and my parents homeschooled us.” Their “classmates” consisted of six other far-flung pupils, who they never saw, except once a year in Kalgoorlie “when we had a sports carnival”.

“Once a month or so, a big truck would make its way through the outback,” Dougiamas says. “The truck driver’s wife took an interest in me and dropped me off books. Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis was my first sci-fi book.

“I was pretty solitary on the whole, and I got into reading in a big way, sitting up in the fork of my favourite tree. I’d go for long walks, and I felt quite autonomous, that I could look after myself.”

‘I didn’t get my own computer until I was 16 … I spent every spare minute trying to make it work.’

Martin Dougiamas

By the time the family headed to Perth and formal schooling, young Martin was so advanced that he skipped a school year: self-directed learning had been second nature to him. “In Perth, I went to the gifted camps [for high-achieving students] and got into computers. My best friend had a BBC Micro from the UK, which you plugged into the TV with a monitor. He’d memorise code, whole programs, and he could replicate two-player games. We got good at understanding how everything worked.

Growing up in the desert, where, Dougiamas says, “I felt quite autonomous, that I could
look after myself.”

“I didn’t get my own computer until I was 16, the very first Mac, that to me felt like a super computer. I spent every spare minute trying to make it work, and helped start a Mac users’ group. Computers then involved project-based learning, you taught yourself and there was no internet or reference. It was only later that I realised my background was why I felt comfortable doing stuff on the internet.”

Dougiamas’ trajectory was typical of nerdy teenagers, from hacking into his mates’ systems for anarchistic fun to embarking on a three-month virtual relationship with a woman in the online world of LambdaMoo. “At the end I found out she was married and lived in Oklahoma.”

Dougiamas studied engineering at the University of Western Australia, while building his own bulletin-board system. “This is when modems were new, and I completely wrote the software for a Unix computer. The world was just starting to connect up universities. The whole ethos early on was to share everything – no business models, just university people sharing.

“Having read so much science fiction, I could see what the world could be,” he says. “I was imagining a world where computers were part of everything. I was saying, ‘One day you’ll be able to do all your work on a device you can carry around,’ and no one believed me. Now we take it for granted.”

He moved to Curtin University, changing his course to computer science, and took on a support IT role for campus staff and students struggling to use the new internet. Dougiamas was nicknamed “the boundary rider” and the “Curtin webmaster”: “I looked like the internet Jesus with long hair.” He found himself troubleshooting around the campus, fixing the vice-chancellor’s email glitches or offering IT help to novelist Elizabeth Jolley.

“A lot of my work was introducing the internet to the university in the late 1990s,” Dougiamas says. “I was showing academics the potential of putting their coursework online so their students could access it anytime. I taught students how to create dating websites, car sales websites, the lot. While that was happening, I was using them as my guinea pigs while developing software to help improve the teaching in online courses. I worked every night to make the software fit the course. And that was the prototype for Moodle.

“From the very beginning I built it as an open-source project, so everything you do is seen, line by line, code by code. That way you get feedback and you learn. I put it online and straight away, people found the site. The first overseas user was a private girls’ school in British Columbia. Weird explorers and nerds also wanted to contribute.”

Moodle is born

By then, Dougiamas had two children – Tui and Tom – “and my third child was Moodle”. The name came about, he says, when “I looked for an acronym that you could turn into a verb.” In some dictionaries, the word “moodle” means to dawdle, to tinker, to play around. “It’s a cross between muse and doodle, a creative, aimless thinking process that you don’t push too hard on, and it produces insights. That’s actually how I want people to use Moodle, so it connected in lots of ways.”

Moodle quickly became popular in multiple countries. “I didn’t have time then to finish my PhD thesis, yet I now have three honorary doctorates,” says Dougiamas. “I always believed in this approach to a platform – you write [software to run a platform], and everybody helps to support it, and they’re sharing it back. It’s not just a community of people who buy it and download it.”

“Moodle’s phenomenal growth is one of those warm, fuzzy stories of everyday people fighting for something better and cheaper than what the vendors are offering, and then succeeding,” observes Curtis J. Bonk in his book The World is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionising Education. Bonk was introduced to the “Moodle Man” in Honolulu in 2003, where Dougiamas drew large crowds who clamoured for him to repeat his guest lectures.

With wife Usha, daughter Tui (at left) and son Tom.

“The beauty [of Moodle] is that anyone writing code can add additional features or tools based on this underlying philosophy,” Bonk writes. “… They make more content available to individuals and nations that would not otherwise afford it. They create communities of like-minded educators who share content and want to improve the human condition.”

Dougiamas explains: “Nobody owns the email system and Moodle is the same open source for everyone. Centralising technology under venture-capitalist control has caused some of the worst problems we’re seeing today – the misuse of data, misinformation, surveillance.”

He’s travelled widely and met hundreds of individual users. “A young guy in Indonesia told me he was struggling in life and found his purpose in Moodle – he got into it so much, he started helping institutions and schools around him. It became his whole career, and he can make a living as a Moodle expert.

“I was in the UK when someone in a military uniform comes up to me, a friendly dude who says, ‘We’ve used Moodle to completely revamp all our training for launching a ship.’ They have a lot of turnover because people are moving around in the military, so they have to train everyone. He said, ‘Moodle revolutionised that training, and now we can launch ships faster.’ And you think, ‘Wow, this is the British Navy!’ ”

‘When I’m looking at billionaires, they all seem to be miserable bastards.’

Martin Dougiamas

Trustworthy coach

Professor Sankey says he’s waiting to see which new frontiers will be explored next by Dougiamas. Inevitably, he says, Moodle Man’s new passion will be figuring out the best ways to integrate artificial intelligence into the learning experience.

“When I had coffee with Martin 18 months ago, he was explaining this vision of using AI to help students find their professional identity in this crazy world of ours,” Sankey says. “I thought, ‘Yep, that’s exactly right.’ The use of artificial intelligence can actually draw data together around a person to create their professional identity. But you can’t do that in other systems because it’s all proprietary data owned by others.”

“From the very beginning, I built it as an open-source project.”

Dougiamas thinks every student could be helped by creating an AI “coach” or assistant. “I’m experimenting with how you build a fully trustworthy coach that has your best interests at heart,” he tells me. “It knows all about you because it can read your emails and messages and basically get to know you. It helps you with your priority-setting and prompts you with suggestions, such as: ‘You say you want to learn this, so shall I enrol you in this course?’ ”

He warns that “human brains haven’t changed – if you’re not doing the work, you’re not learning.” And the coach must be trustworthy. “If the machine that’s providing that kind of experience is owned by Musk or Zuckerberg or Google, you can never fully trust it. A lot of what Moodle needs to do is make it easier for our institutional users to integrate AI into their particular situation.”

So why haven’t other programmers and content makers come up with alternatives as popular as Moodle’s platform? “Many who did come up with similar ideas are Americans,” responds Dougiamas. “And Americans come up with businesses first. They build proprietary software that says: ‘You will use our software, and you are tied to us.’ We’re different.”

Last month, Moodle celebrated its 23rd birthday. Online plaudits poured in from around the world: “Huge congratulations to Martin and the entire Moodle team, as well as the amazing global community,” one message read. “You’ve built and continuously evolved the best open-source LMS the world has ever seen. Here’s to many more years of powering learning, collaboration and innovation around the globe!”

Back home, Dougiamas is pleased that Moodle is used by the WA School of the Air, now called the School of Isolated and Distance Education. “Back in my day, it wouldn’t have been possible. But today, they have satellite access back to Perth.”

It’s a neat closing of the circle for the Moodle Man. But he’s just as happy that other people – educators, software developers and users – are improving Moodle every day. “When I’m looking at billionaires, they all seem to be miserable bastards. I always thought that the mission I had was way stronger than anything I could do with money. I wanted to see open platforms, open infrastructure that helped as many people as possible. And I would venture to say that’s a bit of an Australian thing.”

When he received one of his three honorary doctorates from a Catalan university, an audience member asked Dougiamas what would happen to Moodle if he stepped away. He startled his audience with the tongue-in-cheek answer, typical of a boy from the bush: “If I suddenly get eaten by a kangaroo, I feel sure the project would carry on just fine.”

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