Reflections on the Moodle Moot

The Moodle Moot is over, at least for me it is. There's still a couple of sessions going on but I'm shot from talking LMS all day long. For some reason, a vision of a wet moodle keeps popping into my mind ... please stop that.

Just a few thoughts in closing:
1) The best part for me today was to be with a whole bunch of anti-Blackboard people. There was only one person (that I saw) who was trying to say that Blackboard is not evil. The vast majority of the attendees were either former Blackboard users, or current BlackCT users who are planning to switch away from Darth Vader. (flickr photo courtesy of emerald isle druid)

2) The user/developer community of Moodle is growing and passionate. Those seem to be two key components of a successful FOSS project.

3) California is becoming increasingly Moodlefied. The California schools are all over the map as far as LMS implementation is concerned, but if they ever have one system that is clearly dominant, it will likely be Moodle based on the momentum I'm sensing. Maybe they should send a contingent to the D2L User Conference this summer to see how the other half lives.

4) More and more large installations of Moodle are being used around the world. It will be interesting to see how the scaleability holds up. Moodle aficionados say it is no problem, but of course they wouldn't say otherwise. I'll wait to see the data.

5) This Moodle Moot (can't say that without laughing, at least on the inside) has drawn a very diverse group from different types of institutions, different roles in those institutions, and with different motivations for coming to the Moot.

6) IMO, Desire2Learn Version 8 has more functionality, more features, and just more things to recommend it when compared to Moodle. However, Moodle would currently be my second choice for an LMS although I would like to get a better look at the newest version of Angel before deciding that (opinion) for sure. If I was going to recommend an open source LMS for someone, I would definitely choose Moodle over Sakai ... and it's not even very close.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Barry, good to see you at the Moot:p, sorry you missed the later afternoon sessions.

There are some tutorials on the new format and other tools we built for Intel's Moodle rollout here, if you are interested.

Best
Michael Penney
February 20, 2007 2:40 PM
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