Bijaya Kumar Shrestha
One fine afternoon of March 22, 2017, through the connection from one of my friends who runs a software company in Kathmandu, I was set to have a formal meeting with the representative from a college located in Kathmandu, and share the ideas and applications of several freely available Information Communication Technology (ICT) tools to support teaching-learning procedure. During that conversation, the perception that I was built with was entirely changed. I was shocked to know that representative wasn’t aware of using Learning Management System (LMS), and that wasn’t expected from someone who was in the key managerial position of the college offering Computer Science and Information Technology(CSIT) for more than six years. He was very excited to hear the procedure of LMS to enhance e-learning and make the teaching-learning procedure easy. Along with the use of LMS, he showed his great interest in the ideas about the free email domain service that Google is providing to the educational institutions of developing countries. We ended about an hour-long meeting, talking about various other simple ICT tools that can make the teaching-learning process easy and efficient.
The incident was an eye-opener for me as I started pondering on the ideas of e-learning, and how this idea can be executed by enhancing the teaching–learning process and enrolling most users, and disseminating the ideas further. Implementation of ICT in an academic institution for conducting educational activities has resulted in its proper management and operations. This means, learning ICT does not guarantee success, rather circulating ideas, actions, and management only assure its achievement. The history can be traced back to the 1990s with the introduction of the computer, technology, and the internet in teaching and learning activities which jointly means the use of ICT in education. This interconnection of ICT and education is moreover identified as e-learning; it is simply learning through electronic media. The media can be of different forms of technology ranging from CD-ROMs to web-based applications. The choice of these technologies is based on the user’s abilities, needs, and expectations. However, the rapid growth and development of the internet have helped to show that most of the developed e-learning solutions are web-based. The most important thing considered in the e-learning environment is how it can facilitate and support to make learning styles and learning outcomes better than traditional ones. This is the main idea of ICT, it helps one who wants to learn new styles and get innovative ideas. We are still facilitating the traditional way of teaching or learning, but the concept of ICT is to go beyond that outdated methods and focus on new strategies of knowledge sharing. It means e-learning must be applied and be user friendly, meet their anticipations and requirements.
There are a lot of e-learning platforms for managing online education. These e-learning platforms are also popularly known as LMS, is a web-based platform. Let me, elaborate on the ideas of LMS and the way it has been instigated in the academic world. Whether developed or developing countries, in academic institutions, LMS is taken as a resource for enhancing collaboration and communication between different academic stakeholders such as teachers, students, and management. The academic institutions have different options of choosing the right package of LMS that best fits their learning objectives, as its core functions are to comprise the creation and management of learning content, planning, handling of learning objectives, tracking students’ participation and progress. Academic institutions are benefitted from these platforms as one can come upon with material management ideas, discussion forums, chats, and quizzes which are among the most common and basic features available in most of the LMS. This is not only confined within these features rather can be based or customized on the technical architecture of the system and requirements of the users, i.e. other features can be added.
The world is now more grounded on technological advancement. Considering this idea, the use of LMS to support teaching and learning processes in academic institutions is growing very rapidly. Top Universities and Colleges are acquiring systems with additional functionalities that can match their specific needs and requirements.
Among many, Moodle is one of the most popular open-source LMS being practiced within academic institutions. Firstly, it is popular because of being more user friendly i.e. its simplicity, and secondly, it is an open-source LMS which can be easily customized according to the need of the academic institution. Moodle being an open-source software supports the creation and facilitation of an online learning system that can be used to support online courses as a supplement to traditional face-to-face teaching and learning.
Technically, the concrete attributes of Moodle are flexibility, compatibility, and ease of use. It is well known for its modular design which provides avenues for extension and customization. The system serves as an application core with various plugins for added functionality with all the possibilities of extensions and modifications. It can also be used as a stand-alone system. Moodle is developed under the LAMP platform where Linux as the operating system, Apache as the webserver, MySQL (Structured Query Language) as Database, and Hypertext Processor (PHP) as the Programming language. Its installation is easy with the basic requirements of a PHP supporting webserver and databases from MySQL, Oracle, or PostgreSQL and file storage. Requirements for installations are an internet connection and a web browser that generally supports What You See Is What You Get [WYSIWYG] HypertextsMark-up Language (HTML) editor.
Moodle has been hit among the users and it didn’t taste its success within a single day. There are lots of platforms like Moodle but it came out to be the leader among all. The basic reason behind its success is its foundation traced back to its underlying philosophy; the systems’ design and development are basically centered towards promoting learning through interaction and communication among its core users. The Moodle community is growing rapidly, currently, there are about 79,400 registered sites, 7.2 Million courses, and 74 Million users in over 232 countries. These users include teachers, students, software developers, researchers, educational and system administrators. One of the fascinating things about Moodle is its system, which has been translated and is available in about 82 languages.
However, in Nepal, most of the institutions’ stakeholders are completely unaware of using the LMS platform Moodle to enhance e-education. As mentioned in the anecdote of the introduction section, the scenario is no option to CSIT course offering colleges of Kathmandu district (there are total of 17 colleges offering CSIT course of undergraduate level in affiliation with Tribhuvan University). If one wants to compete in this world of technology and enhance e-learning they must have the fundamental ideas, also must be aware of LMS, its usage, and implementation to support teaching-learning procedure. We can at least count these ideas to be circulated in so-called CSIT Colleges, that too, in Kathmandu district. Thus, it has been a great experience to understand the importance of e-learning, the awareness and perceptions of CSIT College management persons on their perspectives towards ICT and LMS, also the implementation of LMS to enhance e-learning at their institutions.
[Bijaya Kumar Shrestha is a school principal with a demonstrated history of working in the higher education industry. He is also an independent Software Project Manager and Education Technology consultant. His skills are in Education Leadership, Educational Technology, Software Project Management, and Organizational Culture. He also has a strong education professional with a Master of Technology – MTech in Information Technology from Kathmandu University (KU). He is the recipient of the Erasmus Mundus Scholarship, and US Embassy Nepal’s International Visitors Leadership Program (IVLP) fellow in ‘Education in Digital Age, 2019’.]