Test-driving Moodle

During the first week of May I'll be moderating an online discussion for the University of Wisconsin Distance Education Certificate Program. This is a special topics course where the group explores a different topic for one week at beginning of each month. The Topics are:
  • February: "Real" Ways to Promote Interaction for Effective Online Learning
  • March: Learning on Demand: Using the PDA for Mobile Course Delivery
  • April: Creating and Using Learning Objects with Open Source Tools
  • May: e-Learning Quality Improvement Through Peer Review
I'll post more about the course quality discussion later, but for now I'll just tell you that I'm excited to use Moodle during the week of the discussion forum. Moodle is the one of the open source IMS/CMS/LMS (take your pick) platforms that has seen a great deal of development over the past couple years.

Nancy Rebholz of UW has given her permission for me to post this link to a 12 minute Camtasia video about Moodle. This was made specifically for participants in the discussion series, so it does not attempt to look deeply into Moodle, but does give you an idea of the interface and the discussion tool. Take a look.

Wikipedia entry about Moodle.
One school's comparison of Blackboard and Moodle.

BTW, anyone can download and install a copy of Moodle. You don't have to have your own college or anything like that. ;)

Comments

Anonymous said…
Your are Nice. And so is your site! Maybe you need some more pictures. Will return in the near future.
»
July 20, 2006 10:22 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving
Read more

Distance Education and Reauthorization

Image
The Committee on Education and Labor in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "College Opportunity and Affordability Act" (H.R. 4137 ) on November 15, 2007. This means we are nearing the end of the long road leading to reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA). The House committee bill now joins the bill passed by the U.S. Senate (S.1642) in July 2007. House link: H.R. 4137 , go to part H, section 496-A Senate link: S. 1642 , go to part G, section 491 (formerly 496) At some point the language differences between the House and Senate will need to be hammered out. However, with regard to accreditation concerns for distance education, the House committee bill is identical to the Senate bill. The current language would allow college and university accrediting agencies to address the quality of a school’s distance education offerings without the need to create separate standards, procedures or policies related to distance education (for a while this looked to be the dire
Read more