Education
As a child Dougiamas lived for some years in the desert in Western Australia, where he studied at home and through materials dropped off by aeroplane. Later, while studying for a master"s degree and Doctor of Philosophy at Curtin University, Australia, Dougiamas began developing the set of online tools that would become Moodle. Dougiamas"s Doctor of Philosophy thesis project is entitled "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry".
Career
He has worked on constructivist models of teaching and learning online, and led the development of the open source Moodle learning platform. Dougiamas is the executive director of Moodle Pty Limited, the company that drives development of Moodle and is financed partly through certified service providers in the Moodle Partner network. Significant related services include MoodleCloud for hosted Moodle courses and the Moodle Mobile App, which extends Moodle functionality to mobile devices.
The Moodle project is backed up by a large online community and in January 2016 the crowdfunding Moodle Users Association was launched.
In an interview in 2010 he said that this unusual educational experience perhaps prepared him for developing an Internet-based learning platform. Originally Moodle was an experiment within his Doctor of Philosophy research but the widespread adoption of Moodle meant that he could not complete that research.
In 2015 Moodle was probably the most popular Learning Management System in the world, with the most number of users, and boasting 70,136 registered in 222 territories worldwide. Dougiamas is a defender of open-source software and has been involved in open-source advocacy.
He was active in the revocation by the United States Patent Office of the patent claim for "Internet-based education support system and methods" (United States 6988138) submitted by Blackboard.
The application described an Internet system in which different access rights to various course management resources can be granted to different user. In 2004 Dougiamas was described by Brent Simpson as "one of the rare instances in Open Source software development where the right person with the right personality appears at exactly the right time. Martin Dougiamas is the Linus Torvalds of the Learning Management System world and his software is the Linux of this software.".
