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

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more