2 A commitment to open source software
Through 2004 and 2005 the Open University considered how best to develop its online presence. It is not the purpose of this website to record how the decision to follow an open source route was taken but to describe what followed the announcement in October 2005 that the OU was going to develop its future VLE around Moodle. To reinforce its decision, and in recognition that none of the commercial or open source VLEs of that time were considered to be flexible enough to meet our needs, the university was prepared to invest to build some of the required flexibility into Moodle. £5 million was committed to the initial development programme that started in 2005 and ended in July 2008. This sum was spread across 11 projects, of which eAssessment was one. But the programme was not only about technical development. It had to take out its message to multiple areas of the university and the investment had to include many student facing areas, from the electronic library to considerations of the impact on associate lecturing staff (associate lecturers are the OU’s face on the ground conducting tutorials, marking essays, moderating forums and more.). So while £5 million was committed for development this had to cover technical, process and people development. Since August 2008 the university has continued to develop both Moodle and OpenMark through its normal systems support mechanisms and in 2010-2011 there was a further period of accelerated development and it was during this period that a fully re-engineered Moodle Question engine emerged for Moodle 2.1. It is this engine that continues to power the examples that are running on this site.
This website will focus primarily on the technical developments of Moodle itself from Moodle 1.6 to Moodle 2.6, developments that built on the efforts of others and are now in place for others to take further.
As well as the general commitment to financing further developments of Moodle the OU made one further important commitment to the Moodle eAssessment module (the Quiz module) when the university agreed to provide the Quiz Lead Developer for the global Moodle community. Tim Hunt has filled this role admirably for the past eight years, overseeing all Moodle Quiz developments as well as leading the OU’s own technical developments.
Here is a historical picture of the OU's eAssessment development team from 8th January 2008 as OU Moodle 1.9, went live.
In 2014, and now augmented by Colin Chambers, this is still the main OU Quiz development team. In 2012 we were pleased to collaborate closely with Chris Sangwin on making STACK available as a Moodle question type, while Jamie Pratt has been a regular contractor to us in developing new question types and improved Quiz reports.
1 Overview