An Outsourced Open Source LMS and a Pot of Gold? | EDUCAUSE CONNECT Annotated
tags: blackboard, lms, lms-project, moodle
Like many WebCT campuses, SUNY Delhi must select a new LMS and complete migrating to the new system in the next year. The total cost of ownership comparison led us to adopt a remotely hosted open source solution. We’ll examine the facts, figures, and progress of moving from WebCT to Moodle and integrating with Banner.
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tags: lms, lms-project, moodle
tags: lms, lms-project, moodle
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tags: lms, lms-project, moodle
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Warning: This is a lengthy post as it contains the notes I was keeping over the course of today.
I am down in Southbridge, MA, a 3-hour drive from the mountains of NH, for a NERCOMP event which is bringing together current and hopeful Moodle users from the northeast region of the U.S. Today’s event is hosting five sessions:
The weather made me a bit late so the first session, Moodle Intro & Highlights was already underway by the time I got here. The speaker was Ellen Murphy, Director of Technology Integration for The Sage Colleges. She used her own Moodle site as part of the demo which in essence was a fly-by of the typical features of Moodle. Unfortunately her talk was interrupted by technical issues and as a result the flow of the discussion was not as smooth as I think she might have liked. She emphasized taking advantage of the Moodle.org site for development and support.
Sidebar: It was interesting to hear the 60 or participants echoing their frustrations with Blackboard. I ran into my CIO down here who was facilitating a NERCOMP Project Management seminar in the same building. Turns out he was using our local efforts to examine our LMS strategy as the basis for the projects that his seminar participants were focusing on. The reactions to Blackboard in his room were almost as polarized!
The second session, Faculty Perspectives on Using Moodle was for me an invaluable insight into what is important to faculty when it comes to the adoption of Moodle as the LMS platform in higher ed. Joanne CannonCarlson, Assistant Director of Educational Technology Services at Smith College was accompanied by three of her faculty members. From the English department, Jefferson Hunter. Representing the Languages, Judith Keyler-Mayer and from the Psychology department, Beth Powell.
Session three, Student Response to Moodle, was a presentation by Paul Chapin, Academic Technology Specialist from Amherst College, on student usage of the former Blackboard solution and their perceptions of Moodle. The beginning of the presentation was an overview of current studies and surveys. He cited the following data sources (I’ve linked to the ones I could find):
The most used aspects of the LMS itemized below in order of highest to lowest usage (which I think he pulled from another recent study I will try to find and cite):
At Amherst, they tested Moodle with just a few pilot courses. No formal training in favor of just in time support. This went largely unused as their faculty weren’t interested in trying anything new. They also surveyed their students about their usage of Blackboard, their usage of Moodle and which they preferred (Moodle won by a large margin but few responses fell into the Highly Agree column. Students just wanted a decision to be made and did not want more than one environment to work in. They also mentioned that the value of either LMS was dependent solely upon the faculty member’s effective use of the technologies to further class objectives.
Session four, From One CMS to Another in a Summer: Blackboard Basic to Moodle was presented by Joanne CannonCarlson of Smith College. Their move to Moodle resulted from an inability to upgrade their system due to lack of financial support from their administration. College would pay for basic Bb license only, but faculty wanted the feature set in the Enterprise license. Deciding factor was the reality that there were now tools available that could do at least as much as their Bb product and in many areas could provide even more functionality at a potentially lower cost. The conversion process was not without pain - porting courses from Bb to Moodle involved a significant effort on the part of her staff of three student workers who did the work to port more than 200 courses over the summer. The worst part, Joanne noted, was the porting of quizzes as these all had to be manually recreated.
TCO focused on three areas: 1) Licensing fee (Bb Basic - $12k annually based on campus size and feature set), 2) Hardware and infrastructure requirements and 3) Support cost. Their experience was that supporting Moodle takes approximately 10% of her time compared to the 50% that Bb had required. Their first semester of use showed an increase in the total number of active courses taught, from 300 under Bb to 400 with Moodle. Moodle is also being used by departments and campus organizations for communication and management.
Most important lessons learned: only two faculty complaints about the new system and throughout summer they would port course and send out an invite to that faculty member which individualized the approach to retraining. The training focused just on those tools that they had already been using through Blackboard.
Smith factoid: 100 hours of training yielded 400+ courses in Moodle
this past fall. 2 complaints - 0.5% of total faculty population
Smith Documentation - some really high end items here, including Flash-based tutorials
Session five, Customizing Moodle, presented by Damon Blanchette of Smith College touched on hacking Moodle. Touted the resources already available through Moodle.org in the form of modules and plug-ins. He mentioned that Smith had incorporated Quickmail to facilitate communication. In my own state of New Hampshire, the Portfolio block is also a popular add-on. Gradebook+ from Humboldt State is another add-on they are using.
As Smith is a Banner school, they are looking to integrate their SIS with their LMS. This is something that bears watching for us as we are a Banner shop as well. Smith is using Moodle 1.7 which has a number of improvements, one of which is the institution of new roles in the environment which can specify with granularity what each role is capable of doing.
[tags] nercomp, moodle, lms, cms, course, management, system, learning [/tags]
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I’ve been kicking the tires on Moodle for a while now and it turns out that my institution, Plymouth State University, is interested in exploring this open-source learning management system as well. As the lead facilitator for this project, I’ve been asked to provide training and support for a number of our faculty who have been kind enough to volunteer to pilot a few courses to test its efficacy. As a result, I’ve been looking for documentation in the area of course development and pedagogy.
There are a number of online resources if you have the patience to search and sift through the flotsam and jetsam to find your answer. Of course, this approach assumes that you know your question. So I did a quick search for Moodle titles and came across two publications. One is a 2005 title published by O’Reilly and entitled “Using Moodle.” The other title is by a publisher I had never heard of, Packt Publishing. Written by William H. Rice, the book is entitled “Moodle - E-Learning Course Development.”
I asked for a complimentary copy to review and they were nice enough to accomodate me with the caveat that I write a review of the title. I’m in the process of tying the book to my faculty development and will publish the review here in about a week.
In the meantime, I’ll be attending the NERCOMP Moodle Interest Group this Friday at Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. If you’re a reader and attending let me know and we’ll catch up F2F!
Turns out that a number of larger higher ed institutions in the United States are using or turning to Moodle as well. The list below is compiled from Moodle’s registered sites list. I was surprised to see so many University of California schools on the list considering their system-wide adoption of SAKAI. There was also a recent article on the Campus Technology website that mentioned UCLA was adopting Moodle as their campus LMS.
Here’s the list:
[tags]lms, cms, learning, course, management, system, moodle [/tags]
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