Moodle in English: Sakai Vs. Moodle

Sakai vs. Moodle, a side by side comparison:

(note: i have no real affiliation w/ Moodle or Sakai. I am a third party observer with a strong interest in open-source web-app solutions.)

For IT directors at schools debating whether to use Sakai or Moodle as a course management solution, here is a side by side comparison. All signs point strongly towards Moodle kicking Sakai's butt and to the Carnegie Foundation and Sakai Partners wasting $6.6M.

Founded:
Moodle: 2002
Sakai: 2004

Community Website Traffic (Alexa):
Moodle: 150 per million
Sakai: 20 per million

&u=sakaiproject.org

Install Base:
Moodle: 8,900
Sakai: 35

Business Readiness Rating (OpenBRR.org):
Moodle: 4.19
Sakai: 3.23

Vendors:
Moodle: 27
Sakai: 11

Funding:
Moodle: $0 initial funding and ~ $12,000 a year from individual donors.
Sakai Project: $2,200,000 initial grant from Carnegie $4,400,000 from core partners.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Vu Hung - Monday, 30 January 2006, 3:36 PM

Thanks Zack,
These are very impressive figures for Moodle community. Moodle is effective and efficient.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Monday, 30 January 2006, 4:36 PM

Emphasis on "efficient". The Sakai folks cut off their legs by opting for the Java stack.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Marcus Green - Monday, 30 January 2006, 5:53 PM

"Emphasis on "efficient". The Sakai folks cut off their legs by opting for the Java stack."

What do you mean by that?

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Monday, 30 January 2006, 6:21 PM

Developing web-apps on the Java stack adds costs at every level. It is more expensive to run / configure / support the web-server stack, and developers costs more per hour which makes vendors more expensive. But most importantly it narrows your pool of 'tinkerers' considerably. It is much less likely for somebody w/o much time or budget to bother wrangling Java to get Sakai running on their own. These tinkerers are what makes up the meatiest part of the 'hobbiest' open-source community which is what drives projects like Moodle. By opting for Java the Sakai folks have effectively limited their universe of participants to salaried employees of Universities and vendors. This is why they had to raise almost $7M to get the project going.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Patrick Karjala - Friday, 3 March 2006, 9:16 AM

I take exception to this comment--Sakai has fully downloadable and open source. Just because it is written in Java does not mean that you have in any way, shape, or form limited the participants on the project. People are free to tinker with it as well as make changes to it as desired, and may contribute those changes back to the community. Implying that people who "tinker" or who are "hobbiests" do not use Java is off the mark without some supporting evidence.

That is not limiting it to just "salaried employees of Universities and vendors."

I do agree that yes, they put a lot of money into the project that they might have saved by getting more community involvement and input. But I'm not the Sakaiproject.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Friday, 3 March 2006, 10:20 AM

By and large most 'hobbiest' web-app development that goes on in the open-source world is done on the LAMP stack not Java. The best example of this in the world of open-source CMS's. Content management applications are the most commodified open-source web-apps out there and there is far more activity around open-source CMS projects built on LAMP than ones built on Java.

http://theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=33163
"After reviewing many of the Portal/CMS options out there, Java communities Indicthreads.com and Javalobby.com have both concluded that PHP-based alternatives are better choices than existing open source Java-based systems. "

http://indicthreads.com/content/view/161/1/
"As of today, the PHP CMSs seem to have convincingly beaten the Java ones. "

http://www.javalobby.com/
"Is there any Java package that does what this PHP package does?
We have a couple of new sites in development for the Javalobby network, and we have been facing the tough question of whether or not to use Java to build them? After long consideration we're close to deciding not to, at least not for the main core of the sites. Instead, we're thinking we may try out the powerful PHP content management system called Drupal. As far as we know there's nothing quite like this in the Java space, and the effort required to implement the features Drupal offers by default would take us a long time to develop in Java. It just doesn't make sense to start from scratch when there's an active community already growing around Drupal. We have looked at JetNuke, JBoss Portal, and several other Java-powered options, but as far as we can tell they are not superior for our purpose."

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Richard Wyles - Saturday, 4 March 2006, 7:04 AM

I concur, we avoided Java because there is a much larger foundry of code in the LAMP world. Also agree that the TCO is higher with a Java stack. Tends to be more server hungry and yes, there are less tinkerers. I can't see how Zack's post can be construed as offensive.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Marcus Green - Monday, 6 March 2006, 11:32 PM

"Developing web-apps on the Java stack adds costs at every level. It is more expensive to run / configure / support the web-server stack, and developers costs more per hour which makes vendors more expensive. "

The only place Java costs more to run than PHP is that you need more hardware/cpu cycles per user instance/session/request. The up front financial cost of the most widely used Java server/container (Tomcat) is the same as PHP and the cost per GPL developer is the same.

"But most importantly it narrows your pool of 'tinkerers' considerably. It is much less likely for somebody w/o much time or budget to bother wrangling Java to get Sakai running on their own."

It tends to narrow down the pool of tinkerers to those who have explicit training in programming. Java is very widely taught in Computer Science courses (the default I suspect) whereas PHP is rarely taught. One of the reasons many Free PHP applications are a nightmare to support is that the coders behind them have more entusasm than training. Fortunatly of course Moodle does not come into that category.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Tuesday, 7 March 2006, 12:50 AM

Hi Marcus, in my experience getting a shared host with Tomcat or JBoss is much more expensive than a shared host with PHP. When I saw John Roberts of SugarCRM speak at OSCON last summer, he mentioned this as an essential reason why his team of former java/c++ coders wrote Sugar in PHP: the idea was to market from the 'bottom up' rather than the top down, e.g. folks could download, try the product out, implement it, modify it, etc. on a low cost shared host environment.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Martin Dougiamas - Monday, 30 January 2006, 5:14 PM

Thanks, Zack!

Fun.

Of course much more is spent on Moodle than $12,000/year - most of the developments are paid for in some way or other, either by moodle.com clients, Moodle Partners, institutions paying local developers, or volunteers donating their own very valuable time.

Still, this falls way short of Sakai's funding. I can only dream of what I could do with $2,000,000 in the Moodle Trust's bank account!! wide eyes

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Monday, 30 January 2006, 6:26 PM

Yeah, understood there is an economy outside of the moodle.org community with clients paying vendors for services. But really the lions share of that $7M doesn't go to client services, it goes directly to fund the Sakai Project.

I can't dream of what Moodle could have done with that $2M. And I can't dream of why in the world the Sakai folks would ignore the years of impressive work in this community and choose to go it alone. In the end I would not be surprised if Sakai ends up being scrapped. In fact, I would bet on it.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Max Stenlund - Wednesday, 1 February 2006, 4:21 PM

The strength of collaboration Open Source and Moodle can´t be compared with financial strength of commercial projects. If you or the project had $2,000,000 Moodle would be dead in 6 months.

In Sweden, as in many other countries, voluntary project has crashed after they got foundings from the state. Suddenly everyone wants to get paid for their services...

The work with Moodle, as I see it, get a lot of energy from beeing "an underdog" that competes with big commercial products as Bb. The day (it may never come) this changes and Moodle transform to well financed, market leading product, the collaboration will end and so Moodle as we we know it.

In other words, dont crave for too much money...

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Martin Dougiamas - Wednesday, 1 February 2006, 5:25 PM

Actually, I don't think most of us do "compete" with Blackboard etc - it's certainly not a driving factor. Moodle has an internal research life - I know I hardly ever even see other LMS systems

What I want to do is pay back the volunteers that we already have and get them away from their day jobs so they can keep doing it full-time for us.

You might be surprised at how much money I already spend to make stuff happen.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Marcus Green - Wednesday, 1 February 2006, 6:39 PM

Moodle may not compete with Blackboard but it does fit into a very very similar technology space and can be compared feature by feature. When demonstrating Moodle at the Bett show this year , rather than naming BB I referred to it as "my experience with commercial products"

Last year I was teaching "Computer Based Learning" to undergraduates and I got them to compare Moodle with BB. As a Moodle zealot It was fascinating to read the assignments of less biased users. Of course Moodle came out very well in the comparison.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Martín Langhoff - Tuesday, 7 February 2006, 1:04 PM

Actually, I don't think most of us do "compete" with Blackboard etc - it's certainly not a driving factor. Moodle has an internal research life - I know I hardly ever even see other LMS systems

I know we're veering somewhat offtopic here but... in the coming BBWorld'06 conference (BBMoot'06 if you may) there are two presentations and one panel about Open Source. The panel is titled "Open Source and Blackboard". Yummm.

Wonder what they'll talk about?

Session Focus: Blackboard Academic Suite

Open Source technologies in e-Learning are gaining mindshare. In this session, panelists will provide their perspectives on issues including: whether and why institutions should consider piloting open source applications on campus, relative merits of Blackboard versus currently available open source e-Learning software, and how proprietary and open source technologies work together at their institutions.

Now, I've been to a few MoodleMoots and haven't seen any sessions on Blackboard... perhaps I wasn't paying attention

The URL for this gem is http://www.bbworld06.com/pag_Academic.asp

...gotta get back to a database import that I left running...

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Robert Garza - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 6:00 AM

I also found this little gem on the Blackboard website. (I did not find it posted to any Moodle fourm so I hope this is not a repeat) Here is the link:

http://library.blackboard.com/docs/AS/Bb_Presentation_Open_Source.ppt

It is dated 2005-08-04 (on the Bb site) but it seems to have been written a bit earlier. It is not bad reading and not that long.

The agenda of the presentation:

Introduction
Background on Sakai and Moodle
Blackboard's Approach to Openness
Responding to Open Source

My curiosity is how would presentation would be changed if it was written today. hmmmmm......

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by A. T. Wyatt - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 7:48 AM

Wow, what a great link! Thanks!

One of my friends was in an on-line class with a BB consultant today. Part of the conversation included the admission that BB has really focused on enterprise class installations to the detriment of BB Basic Edition (which is what most smaller schools used). Small schools have been, essentially, priced out of the market. The consultant thought that this was a mistake on the company's part, but I expect those decisions are made pretty high up the line. There was some talk about the ability of Sakai to survive now that the Mellon funding has ended. I guess many of us will be watching that closely as well!

When I go to conferences, the bigger schools always ask the same questions and they all have to do with enterprise tools. The closer Moodle developments come to enabling institutions to automate course creation, enrollment, and making the data interoperable the better. I follow some of the enterprise work done by Dan Stowell and others, and I believe that these are very important initiatives.

atw

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Robert Garza - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 10:06 AM

I think for Moodle to enter into the "large school" or "enterprise" arenas there has to be integration into various SIS apps (Student Information Systems). The one I hear about here in Texas is "Banner" by Sungard/SCT. I would love to work on a Banner integration project and other SIS integrations. I think that would put Moodle one more step closer towards being viewed as an enterprise solution for large schools...at least by those that who don't think that it is.

It would also lay down a foundation for Moodle to have a deeper proven track record in the large deployment arena.

As far as PHP being considered only a scripting language and does not scale...I think PHP is coming of age and people are looking at PHP and trying to create a framework for multi-tier web applications. But that is a totally different discussion.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by N Hansen - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 7:58 PM

These stats are misleading, especially probably the earlier ones, when people are searching for "Sakai" they aren't necessarily searching for the LMS. Sakai is a chef to begin with.

It's probably more meaningful to search this way:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=moodle%2C+sakai&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

This way you are more likely to be comparing the relative weight of searches with regards to the places where Moodle is actually popular. I think that first search was just looking at places where the chef was popular.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Jim Farmer - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 10:08 PM

Robert Garza raises the issues that all of the CMS suppliers are carefully consideringwhat will be sustainable in the long-runand at what price.

Some comments:

Blackboard did ask Sakai to become a commercial affiliate. Sakais responsebased, in part on uPortals positive experience with Uniconwas to focus on those commercial firms that would agree to support the Sakai product. To promote interoperability Blackboard extended an invitation to both uPortal and Sakai to attend the Building Blocks Conference and suggest how better to work together in the future.

In an interview with Blackboards Matt Pittinskey in the May issue of Campus Technology, he said interoperability of Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai (via Building Blocks, Moodle blocks, and tools) is a Blackboard priority. Blackboard continues to implement standards that support interoperability of learning materials, blocks and tools, and integration with student, library, and other administrative systems.

Blackboards offer to work closely with all open source CMS projects is welcomed and I believe genuine. As it turns out, the Blackboard executives, Martin Dougiamas, and Jason Cole will all be attending the IMS ALT-I-Lab meeting next month in Indianapolis. I hope they have the opportunity meet.

As the cited Blackboard presentation points out, long-term support of any software product is important to users. The OSS Watch project at the University of Oxford has hosted three conferences on open source; the last focused on sustainability. You may want to review the presentations (http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/). OSS Watch expects to issue a report shortly on sustainability of open source software.

Following the Savannah MoodleMoot in February, there was a friendly debate at IYC's eLearning 2006 with Blackboard. Blackboards Afroze Mohammed again stressed long-term support, a point well received by an audience that delivers eLearning every day to thousands of students. Martins keynote at the same conference was exceptionally well received. His focus on teaching resonated with this audience that must deliver effective courses. I hear Martins presentation at the MoodleMoot and Jason Cole luncheon keynote will be available soon on DVD.

A. T. Wyatt points out the importance of having an entry-level product. Several of the software suppliersIBM, SugarCRM, and MySQLhave open source entry-level software products and subscription support services available as use grows. (Red Hat's success is solely based on subscripton support). Blackboard is aware of this emerging business model; Blackboard Basic successfully fulfilled this role for a number of years. Moodles market share appears to come from those initial implementations that, over time, become enterprise level implementations. This observation of the Moodle community was presented at the April OSS Watch Conference; on an average each five participants in a Moodle activity results in one institutional implementation.

Your comment about Moodle at the enterprise level was first challenged by success in New Zealand and now by Open University in the UK. Within a few months we will know more about the success of Open University. It will be extending Moodle to an increasing number of its 150,000 students. If OU UK is successful, and they are confident, then Moodle will be established as an enterprise system.

The question about compliance with IMS standards was raised. One of the objectives of Open University UK and Open University NL has been full support in Moodle. OU UK will be assisting Moodle to become compliant. (See http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/GENERAL/IMM/I060413F.pdf for details). OU NL was the original motivation for learning design. They believe now there is sufficient experience that Learning Design will become important to course designers. According to Jason Cole, Learning Design 2.0, all levels,will be available in a later version of Moodle.

You also bring up the question of integration, specifically with Banner. When integration is defined by the convenience of single signon, the ESUP Portail project has integrated uPortal and Moodle using JA-SIGs CAS. This makes moving from one application to another possible without signon, and was well received by the 17 universities. SunGard Higher Education has been discussing a broader integration of Banner and Blackboard with Georgetown Universitys Interoperability Center. A student registering in Banner would have course access established in Blackboard immediately. As this work progresses I would expect SunGard to all be interested in Moodle integration as well.

Rather than focus on the differences between Course Management Systems, I hope the focus will be on how to improve teaching and learning; which system is secondary. Carol Twiggs work on course redesignimproved completions and reduced costs of gateway coursesmay be key to accommodating larger enrollments with current resources, improving the success of less-prepared students, and increasing student satisfaction using the technology made available by Blackboard, Bodington, Sakai, OLAT, Moodle, and others. I suggest you read her presentation to the U.S. National Commission on the Future of Higher Education (http://www.ncat.edu/).

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 11:14 PM

A student registering in Banner would have course access established in Blackboard immediately.

Just a note on this, we do this already with Banner and Moodle

. It takes setting up LDAP, but that is a pretty good thing to have for a number of other reasons

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Jim Farmer - Thursday, 18 May 2006, 11:53 PM

The correct URL for Carol Twigg's work and the National Center for Academic Transformation is http://www.center.rpi.edu/.

I apologize for the posting error.

jim

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Jon Allen - Friday, 19 May 2006, 12:53 AM

Good Afternoon,

Correcting a typo in Jim's earlier message. In the sentance:

"Following the Savannah MoodleMoot in February, there was a friendly debate at IYC's eLearning 2006 with Blackboard."

The text "IYC's eLearning 2006" should read "ITC's eLearning 2006," referring to the Instructional Technology Council. For more information on ITC or their 2006 eLearning conference, see:

http://itcnetwork.org/
http://itcnetwork.org/elearning2006.htm

On the DVD of the two keynote presentations from the Moodle Moot...that will be available soon after me computer gets back from the shop. It decided it wanted to go on a vacation to California just as I finished putting it all together, but before I got a master out. For now, the audio from the Moodle Moot is posted in connection with the PDF at: http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/MOODLE/M060210T.pdf

I will post a message on the general discussion when the DVD is complete.

jon

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Thursday, 2 February 2006, 12:35 AM

If you or the project had $2,000,000 Moodle would be dead in 6 months.

Well, if we had it it would be a 'dead' product with a centralized grades table with graded item creation in the gradebook, integrated WebDAV, a full simulation engine in the lesson module, question stemming (like calculated ?s for the humanities), course entry points, publish content from Word (or at least OO, peer review and peer to peer modules (like WebQnA), team based projects, a full roles implementation, an integrated transcripts function and cross course assessments, an integrated e-Portfolio, complete Blackboard and WebCT importation, a web services API for easy, integrations with other services (turnitin, Merlot), etc.

And a suit of well designed tab navigation themes (new icon sets that matched) that would send bb bback to 1998:p.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Richard Wyles - Thursday, 2 February 2006, 6:04 AM

FYI - I've just done a rough count and NZVLE has invested around NZ$700,000 (US$0.5M) in Moodle development to date, not counting research or project management (my time) or our work with Eduforge & other applications (ePrints and Elgg). This is ongoing, with Moodle now the most widely used LMS in New Zealand higher education.

I agree that the consortium type approach as undertaken by Sakai sub-optimises the potential compared to an open source community approach like Moodle, Linux etc. But focused inputs and investments into that community like NZVLE, Humboldt and all the others, i.e. large and small contributions are a strength. It's certainly not all hobbyists, we don't crave the money but we have some big goals. This has parallels to other highly successful FOSS projects.

Also, I agree about the comments on the Java stack - the code-base and subsequent availability of hackers was a major consideration in our initial selection process back in early 2004.

cheers

Richard

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Don Hinkelman - Monday, 30 January 2006, 5:22 PM

Hi Zack,

As a moodle zealot, I am thrilled by the figures. Let's whip their butts!

As a moodle fundraiser, I am disappointed we have so little. Just think what we could have done with 1% of what Sakai got. (but that is wishful thinking--like when I think, what if we took 0.001% of the military money spent in Iraq and invested it in human development projects. Ahhh.)

But as open source researcher, there are other questions I am more interested in. Such as, which one do students prefer? Which one performs better? Which one has more collaborative features? Can anyone offer figures and studies on those questions?

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Monday, 30 January 2006, 6:35 PM

There is no logical reason the Moodle project shouldn't have been central to the initial planning that resulted in the Sakai Project being launched. Moodle has done so much with so little, it drives me nuts to see that kind of money being spent on a doomed project like Sakai.

But, as far as your questions, I would go read the Business Readiness analysis and:

http://www.earlham.edu/~markp/cms/evaluations/chef_moodle_survey/student_opinions.php
http://mfeldstein.com/index.php/weblog/permalink/first_impression_of_sakai_20_better_than_i_expected/

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Ger Tielemans - Tuesday, 31 January 2006, 7:21 AM

With all respect, Moodle and Sakai are aiming at different targets,so compare them does not make sense:

Moodle is just good (very good) in supporting individual courses
Moodle does not support any kind of curriculum organising mechanism, other then catergorize different courses
Sakai is trying to replace tools like SAP
in the first draft they also intended to replace BB and allthe other VLE's, but they became wise and speak now form prefered partners with promissing webservices... yes Moodle and Lams.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Tuesday, 31 January 2006, 7:50 AM

2. What is preventing Moodle from supporting this? Probably not very much engineering
3. How can Sakai hope to replace tools like SAP when they can't even get substantial adoption in the their main focus (course-ware)?
4. integration is going to be messy. I don't know of any IT director that is going to be happy deploying and supporting concurrent course-ware systems.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Ger Tielemans - Thursday, 2 February 2006, 12:57 AM

Are you using Moodle, Zack? (What is your URL)

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Martín Langhoff - Thursday, 2 February 2006, 11:45 AM

> Such as, which one do students prefer?

Michael Penney had a good anecdote on a course that was ran on both BB and Moodle -- posted to this very same forum (but cannot find the link! Damn!).

To get a direct impression of what it feels to use Sakai, I got an account on their website, joined a few forums and participated for a few days. It was quite awkward to use. To their credit, they did steal a page off Moodle's approach of hosting the community with the tool itself, but I am not sure what thet are doing with the resulting feedback.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Thursday, 2 February 2006, 12:46 PM

I think that was actually an action research report by Humboldt instructional designer Joan Van Duzer and Humboldt prof. Dr. Kathy Munoz available here:

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm

Joan will be presenting at the Moot in Savannah, and also at e-Learning 2006, where Martin D. and Jim Farmer will be featured speakers.

As we continue to compare BB to Moodle at HSU, one thing we are finding is that students prefer courses in either system when the courses are designed with best ID practices in mind.

O and faculty and students love the Book module.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Jim Farmer - Thursday, 2 February 2006, 10:18 PM

An insignificant correction to your original posting. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation contributed US$2.4 million to the Sakai Project; the four universities contributed US$4 million. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation contributed US$300,000 to the Sakai Educational Partners Program. The Sakai Partners contributed US$1.3 million over the two years.

Your use of Alexa data as a view of the community and its activity was helpful. Justin Tilton is extending the analysis to JA-SIGs uPortal and other open source projects to see what can be learned from your approach. He is attempting to compare Web activity to the project activity. This may give some additional insight into building and sustaining a successful project.

Sakai and Moodle serve quite different purposes. Sakai focuses on supplementing classroom instruction at major research universities; Moodle focuses on delivering instruction based on Moodle content and activities. In Chapter 15 of Using Moodle Jason Cole identifies the different types of instruction and when they are best used. The Sakai community tends to be software developers and instructional technologists rather than faculty. Sakai has many fewer using universities; each university has about three times the number of community participants as a Moodle site--likely because of size.

Rather than view the two development projects as competitive I believe we all can learn from experiences of both learning systems. Reports such as Joseph Cavanaughs Teaching Online - A Time Comparison and Kathy D. Munoz and Joan Van Duze report Blackboard vs. Moodle: A Comparison of Satisfaction with Online Teaching and Learning Tools are important to the effective use of any learning system (www.immagic.com/eLibrary/ARCHIVES/GENERAL/U_WGA_US/J050300C.pdf and /ARCHIVES/GENERAL/CSU_HSUS/H050215M.pdf).

Economist Paul Courant is heading a Mellon Foundation study on the sustainability of open source. Thanks to the Moodle partners, Ithaka CEO Kevin Guthriewho led the very successful JSTOR effort for Mellonis attending the MoodleMoot to learn more about the product and the community as part of this study. I have always viewed JSTOR is a model for the benefits of collaboration (www.jstor.org).

A similar study of open source is coming from the OSS Watch project at Oxford University.

Thanks, Zach, for taking time to help us better understand open source projects and their community. It gave us another and useful perspective.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Friday, 3 February 2006, 12:26 AM

Hi Jim, thank you for your thoughtful statements. I do have a question about this one:

Sakai focuses on supplementing classroom instruction at major research universities; Moodle focuses on delivering instruction based on Moodle content and activities.

If possible, could you elaborate on the distinction here? It seems to me that Moodle works pretty well for supplementing classroom instruction (that is the majority of the current usage at CSUH and CSUSF).

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Justin Tilton - Saturday, 4 February 2006, 6:51 AM

On January 30, 2006 Zack Rosen posted a comparison of Web traffic for Moodle.org and SakaiProject.org. For his comparisons, Zack used data from Alexa on Web traffic, installations from the respective websites, and Business Readiness Ratings from Carnegie-Mellon University. He also included the number of affiliated commercial firms and comparative funding.

He concluded All signs point strongly towards Moodle [winning the competition]. Subsequent postings discussed the differences in the two projects.

To better understand the learning systems communities, I charted the Website traffic for some learning system suppliers. Figure 1 provides these data for twelve open source and commercial products we find used in higher education. Blackboard and Moodle dominate Web traffic of other products. The Alexa data is based on averages for the last three calendar monthsNovember and December of 2005 and January 2006.

Figure 1 Web Traffic

Alexa also provide data based on the previous three monthsAugust through October 2005. This provides one data point on trends or momentum. The change from the earlier to the later period is shown in Figure 2.
Change in LMS Traffic

Figure 2 Change in Web Traffic

Since the data was gathered for December and January where traffic from colleges and universities could be down as compared to the earlier period because of holidays, I checked the following: Georgetown University up 21%, MIT up 29%, UCLA up 31%, University of Maryland up 26% and University of Michigan up 35%. These are not representative; they are institutions where im+m has affiliations or graduates.

Some cautions. The data depends upon information provided by users that have the Alexa toolbar. This may not be representative of academic users. The amount of information depends upon the ranking; data for some sites, such as PESC, was not available. Alexa ranking data was not used for estimate changes since ranking are relative.

Reach as described by Alexa is the number of users out of a million users that accessed the site each day. A user who accesses the site on two different days would be counted as two users. A user who accessed the site twice on the same day would be counted as one user. Page views is the average number of unique pages accessed by a user in the same day. Two accesses to the same page on the same day would be one user and two page views. Traffic or activity is computed as the number of users times the number of page views.

I accumulated data for 36 organizations. Reach and page view data are separate. The data and additional charts are available at the instructional media + magic, inc. Website in both original MS Excel format and PDF format. The URLs are:

www.immagic.com/eLibrary/SOURCE/IMM/I060202T/I060202T.xls
www.immagic.com/eLibrary/GENERAL/IMM/I060202T.pdf

We will be extending the analysis for the JA-SIG Board (www.ja-sig.org). That analysis will be posted on the im+m Website when completed, likely after the MoodleMoot and the ITC e-Learning 2006 Conference in Savannah next week.

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Paralells between Mozilla / Firefox to Sakai / Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Tuesday, 21 February 2006, 11:07 AM

Netscape saw millions and millions of dollars be poured in the development of the Mozilla platform before the company was bought and the source code to the browser was gifted to the open-source ecology. When the mozilla foundation was set up and the public first got access to the CVS tree for Mozilla source code the resounding reaction seemed to be something like "blech!". As a product the mozilla browser was bloated and hard to use as many of the features added had more to do with what an executive thought should be in a browser rather than what a user of a browser really wanted. As a open-source project, most of the code in Mozilla was rather hastilly assembled and it showed. The Mozilla foundation never ended up doing much with the product or the code... until a couple interns whipped up a little browser that could called "FireFox". Two years later they have 150M users and a warchest of earned revenue funding.

I think the Sakai folks could learn a lot from this story:

Like FireFox just about every feature in Moodle was created because of a a real need from users, not because the folks controlling the funding thought it should be there like Sakai / Mozilla.
Like FireFox the Moodle project was created by innovators looking to solve a problems while Sakai and Mozilla were created in board meetings.
Like FireFox the Moodle project is built from the ground up to be sleek well-understood code while Sakai/Moodle are based on a lot of crufty inherited code (Mozilla from netscape, Sakai from the CHEF project).

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Re: Paralells between Mozilla / Firefox to Sakai / Moodle

by Martín Langhoff - Tuesday, 21 February 2006, 12:51 PM

This example is actually very confusing. Not your fault, but Mozilla designates several different things.

You are referring to the old Mozilla code (what most people know as Netscape 4.x), which was called Mozilla internally. That was open sourced, and got its rendering engine rewritten (the new engine is called Gecko) and it got a new UI infrastructure (XPCOM and XUL) and it is nowadays packaged into several end-user-products, one of them branded Mozilla (internally known as Seamonkey), and another one branded Firefox.

So Mozilla vs Firefox can be

a comparison between old and new codebases of the same overall project, or
a comparison between two packagings of the same codebase

So even in the first case (and I know you are referring to that case) the old Mozilla and today's Firefox are very very similar. The use the same language, the architecture has evolved a lot but the key parts are still there, the community has changed immensely, but Netscape customers with still-current support contracts... now get a Netscape-branded Firefox

Sakai and Moodle are 200% different products. Programming languages, architectures, user communities, everything is different. They aren't related. At all.

I'm sure there are better examples

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Re: Paralells between Mozilla / Firefox to Sakai / Moodle

by Timothy Takemoto - Tuesday, 21 February 2006, 2:58 PM

I can see Zack's point. Zacks points of comparison are given at the end, and they seem fair, except that there is a typo in the third point (it should be Sakai/Mozilla not Sakai/Moodle).

So, it seems that Sakai sucks? I have not tried it.

Tim

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Ben Brophy - Wednesday, 1 March 2006, 6:10 AM

Can't we all just get along? I thought this was supposed to be a bazaar. The Moodle project is doing great stuff and the Sakai project is doing great stuff. I think they should just keep on keepin' on, because neither is sapping strength from the other. And those .LRN and Angel people and all the other scrappy little open source LMSs should keep at it too.

Most of that money from the 'core schools' went to people's salaries benefits, and overhead (the cost to heat the buildings they were sitting in for example). If you totaled up all of the salaries, etc people were payed while they worked on Moodle, you'd probably see a big number there too.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Richard Wyles - Wednesday, 1 March 2006, 7:14 AM

Notwithstanding some of the zeal of Moodlers I'm sure we all do get along. As MD points out in this thread (wrt Blackboard) it's not alternative systems (i.e. the idea of competitive advantage) that drives Moodle development, rather it is needs driven. I know with the NZVLE team we very rarely look at what other LMS platforms offer.

You are right that the larger the global foundary of FOSS the better and there's plenty of room for the pluralism of ideas.

The mention of bazaar though does trigger and interesting comparision between FOSS models of production and in this context it is interesting to look at the Sakai and Moodle communities, without prejudice. Sakai is "a community source software development" with "core" schools and "commercial affiliates". There is a financial requirement to be a core school and therby be able to influence the direction of the code.

In contrast Moodle is a very open community, with a benevolent but strong leadership from its creator, Martin.

The form of community was a significant consideration in the NZVLE selection back in June 2004. However each has their pros and cons, and the phenomenal growth of Moodle may possibly lead to a greater degree of formalised community structure in the future, albeit in a very different form to that of Sakai.

cheers

richard

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Ben Brophy - Wednesday, 1 March 2006, 8:17 AM

You are right. I think the more open structure of Moodle works better. I think the Sakai model was a good experiment - give a core group 2 years to come up with the seed of the software, then open the gates. But since the initial 2 year project ended at the end of 2005 the whole project feels much healthier. The idea of the 4 (or 5 or 6) core schools is history. There are now many schools contributing and we are all pretty much on an equal footing. So I believe more open is better. I hope Sakai takes it farther and goes all the way open.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Ger Tielemans - Sunday, 5 March 2006, 8:00 PM

Ben you make a mistake in your calculation: the salary and the heating of the building was already paid by their boss. Instead of going longer to the dining-hall or driving earlier to their homes, Moodle people spent time on Moodle and by doing that they think about improving education (instead of going to expensive seminars, listening to stories of improving education, yes, elsewhere..) They try things, make educational constructs, go to Moodle forums, exchange experience with others and become better teachers/educators: and their boss likes it! he cannot think of a better investment for improving the educational skills of his teaching staff then allowing them to spent time on Moodle..

it makes a difference when you hire new buildings and new people and new staff to do the job in a new project and need new money for financing this new infrastructure.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Monday, 6 March 2006, 12:42 AM

Yes in our case we had been developing custom code for our faculty to use, in html, javascript, java, perl, flash, director, and run various CMS type things like Postnuke, Xaraya, etc. This method proved hard to maintain, support (as we had to create new training materials and knowledge bases for each 'one-off' tool) and share over the years.

When I moved most of that work into developing new tools in the Moodle framework, we are now producing tools that are much easier to re-use, support, and maintain. This was done during a period of severe staff cutbacks, so I actually had less resources to put into Moodle than we had previously had to put into various other custom educational programming efforts and yet the relative ease of development in the Moodle environment let us develop a number of new tools.

Back when we started looking at OS LMSs, Sakai was still just a CHEF, however I made the judgement at the time that the cost of developing new tools (say for instance a new gradebook

) in Sakai/CHEF was going to me much more expensive than the cost of developing similar tools in Moodle. Everything we have done here (CSU Humboldt) with Moodle has been on a shoestring budget in constant threat of being cut, mostly with student programmers. So, while I admire your attitude and your work, Ben, I can also sympathize with the folks who lament what could have been done had Mellon and the R1's looked outside themselves to scan the OSS environment (as did Jason Cole when he was at SFSU, Richard Wyles, etc.) before committing all those new resources.

I also think the idea of Community Source is a great one for funding OS development (if the right source is chosen

), and that Moodle could be further along than it is if the public institutions using it could form a similar model for funding. IMO, the mistake Sakai is making is the one SugarCRM looked at and avoided (the Sugar team were ace C++ and J2EE coders before starting Sugar): it is hard to spread Sakai virally due to the lack of low cost hosting support, so it must be spread by appealing to CIOs and tech staff rather than being easily spreadable by faculty who set it up on their own.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Monday, 6 March 2006, 12:55 AM

I know with the NZVLE team we very rarely look at what other LMS platforms offer.

Hi Richard, I would suggest this may not be an ideal tactic, there are a number of good ideas in other LMS's that could have nice equivalents in Moodle with very little work, it's 'low hanging fruit' if you don't have to explain a complex work around for a standard feature (emailing selected students) or why Moodle's interface is so much more busy (see our Control Panel/Course Menu block for our solution) and why Moodle cheerfully breaks the 7 +/- 2 rule of application development (or cheefully 'overloads the users visual channel' in cognitive psych terms).

We've done alot of work in this area (above mentioned, tab based theme, essay question in quiz, gradebook, etc.) to reduce switching costs and to get users past the initial 'but it doesn't do this' hurdle so they can see the many features (wiki, glossary, lesson, etc.) they have never thought of using in their previous LMS.

On a related note, I read a good article in Wired the other day about car companies that drive, wear test, and completely dissassemble competitors vehicles in the process of improving their own.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Richard Wyles - Monday, 6 March 2006, 5:18 AM

Thanks Michael,

Good points. It's not so much a conscious tactic, it's just we have particular areas of focus, with a limit on time and resources. Naturally, cool features from other LMSs often bubble up to the surface but this is via tutor or student feedback loops rather than consciously reverse engineering other LMSs.

Yes, I'm still perplexed over the emailing selected students situation & I agree about the visual interface - the work you've done there is great.

cheers

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Richard Treves - Monday, 6 March 2006, 5:28 PM

Hi Michael,

"and why Moodle cheerfully breaks the 7 +/- 2 rule of application development "

could you direct me to a link explaining this? I've heard of 7 +/- 2 in regard to number of topics people can hold in their heads at any one time.

Rich

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle--7 +/-2 rule

by A. T. Wyatt - Monday, 6 March 2006, 9:14 PM

I second this request--I am trying to make sense of some survey results, and this could be an important thread for me to follow! Here is an article that bashes that rule--
http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=4058/nam1012431804/

If that is even the rule you meant, Michael!

atw

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle--7 +/-2 rule

by Ger Tielemans - Monday, 6 March 2006, 10:01 PM

Breaking myths is nice, but applying a correct rule in worng way is something different. The famous article is about the question:

How many NOT RELATED chunks of information van a man handle?

The outcome was and is 7 plus/minus 2.

But as soon as you start to organise information in logical groups, the power of the Short memory of man raises.
Using the rules for design by gestalt in the right way could help here a lot.
When systems with windows came on the market, a complete new dimension was added to the screen-scene: cue's and prompts can boost the memory to a new hight: well, did I say memory? ...read the book of Donald Norman about "the design of everyday life"and discoever how we all reconstruct our memory with the help of all the cue's around us...

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle--7 +/-2 rule

by Tony Hursh - Tuesday, 7 March 2006, 9:31 AM

Absolutely true, Ger. Moodle lets you organize material by weeks/topics/etc. which greatly reduces the cognitive load.

That said, a busy class can still present a somewhat cluttered appearance. The existing methods for hiding topics (whether by the teacher or by the student, using the

image) seems to be a little too coarse-grained.

It'd be nice to have a collapsible tree view within the topic, at least as an option.

I admit that I haven't been keeping up with the development work that's been going on in the Moodle Themes, so maybe someone is already working on this.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle--7 +/-2 rule

by Ger Tielemans - Wednesday, 8 March 2006, 7:08 AM

I like this idea: a collapsible tree inside each section, especially because I expect that we need this when we will become able to import IMS/CP trees!

. Combine this with a separate section import/export and Moodle's visual interface will set a new standard!

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle--7 +/-2 rule

by Michael Penney - Monday, 6 March 2006, 10:29 PM

What we've found with surveying our users of Moodle over ~3 years now is that students try to understand everything that is on the course website, or at least feel they should. Moodle presents everything at once in it's default state, and if the course has a large number of items, students complain that it is 'busy' 'confusing' and not clear what is the important information they need at this time.

The 7+-2 rule comes from instructional design, not general web design I misspoke there, as the two may be very different. For instance craigslist is not necessarily bad web design, as you know going to the site that you don't need to pay attention and learn about every link, just the ones you want. There is a tremendous difference between a casual visit to a list of links or a news site and an excursion into a virtual learning environment, at least for the novice user of the web (which most of ours still are). On the other hand, it was in about 2002 that Google was rather handily demonstrating the effectiveness of even search sites obeying 7+/-2 surprise

.

To me (and our data suggests this is so) a course website is a presentation of information, all of which should be (or may be) important to the learner for that course. That information should also be presented in some logical sequence or hierarchy that helps the learner organize the information. If there is extraneous information or information that the learner is not presently equipped to handle, then it creates confusion and frustration.

So I think the DrDobbs article you linked isn't really about good instructional content design: "He concluded that there is a limit to the amount of items the immediate memory can retain: (7±2). He wasn't studying how many items humans can perceive, which he admits can be thousands"
http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=4058/nam1012431804/

Students presented with a course web site feel they are supposed to retain the information there, and it frustrates them when they have to spend time learning what of the information there is not relevant topic at hand. Having numerous blocks cluttering up the course web page with offers to view participants, change passwords, see who is on line, investigate activities, and see various topics or weeks that may or may not be relevant to the immediate needs of the student. Dr. Richard Mayer's** reseach suggests that this frustration is due to the overloading of the student's visual channel with information. Folks with an overloaded visual channel have a hard time learning new things.

**A good introduction to the subject is Clark and Mayer's eLearning and the Science of Instruction, and then the dozens of research papers of Dr. Mayer's and his colleagues.

I can tell you that when we reduced the default clutter of the Moodle course with the Course Menu/Control Panel block, are faculty and students both reported it made Moodle much easier to navigate and "understand".

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle--7 +/-2 rule

by A. T. Wyatt - Monday, 6 March 2006, 11:30 PM

Thanks for the clarification! We too thought that the course menu/control panel block you guys designed was an improvement, and we implemented that over the Christmas break!

My study showed one of the very few things upon which BB was preferred over Moodle was layout. The students often complained that Moodle was busy and that they did not know where to look for things. Part of that was lack of training. Our pilot study did not provide a lot of training and support (because it was a pilot study, and we were not prepared to serve the number of people who elected to participate). But I think you have hit it right on with this part:

"Students presented with a course web site feel they are supposed to retain the information there, and it frustrates them when they have to spend time learning what of the information there is not relevant topic at hand. Having numerous blocks cluttering up the course web page with offers to view participants, change passwords, see who is on line, investigate activities, and see various topics or weeks that may or may not be relevant to the immediate needs of the student. Dr. Richard Mayer's** reseach suggests that this frustration is due to the overloading of the student's visual channel with information. Folks with an overloaded visual channel have a hard time learning new things."

Have you links to the studies you have done? They could help us immensely. I will take a look at the Mayer's materials.

Thank you very much!
atw

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle--7 +/-2 rule

by Richard Treves - Wednesday, 8 March 2006, 5:14 PM

Hi Michael,

Thanks for the explanation and the ref which I shall follow up. I agree with much of what you say and I have my own thoughts to chuck into the pot.

'I must read everything' effect; when I worked at the UK Open Uni in 2003 they had the bad habit of deluging students with paper when they first joined a course, students just didn't know where to start and felt worried. I understand how this could transfer to a website. You are also quite right to point out that Craig's list is not bad design because you know you can ignore most of the links.

However, I have a different approach to the issue, instead of splitting the links into tabbed pages I remove all none necessary blocks and then as the course progresses I add the blocks. This allows advanced students to use the facilities later on without confusing weak students with link overload at the start of a course. Unfortunately I haven't been able to test it yet. I'm afraid I don't like the tabbed pages layout, this is not because its bad design, its because I'm a spatial learner (pin numbers I remember as postions on the number pad rather than the number itself), I get lost with lots of different screens and prefer everything in one place. Our geography students also tend to be spatial learners too so I think my approach is well worth testing.

I also discovered the works of Edward Tufte over the summer, his view is that you can have both clarity and a high density of information on a web page (although he mostly talks about paper presentation). He criticises sequential pages but I think your tabbed design doesn't really fit into that category.

Finally, I was also impressed by a book called 'don't make me think!' by Krug. His point is that we can all wave your arms around in dicussing ways of presentation but that the true value of a design comes out in testing (and quick and dirty testing is effective).

Rich

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Monday, 6 March 2006, 10:46 PM

Hi Richard, I don't know of a link, by Mayer and Clark's eLearning and the Science of Instruction is a great introduction to the subject of how learners learn and how instructional material design can improve or impede learning.

**note** where I said "application design" I should have qualified 'it with "learning"'.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Zack Rosen - Wednesday, 1 March 2006, 12:32 PM

I don't think this is a sensical viewpoint to take for investors in an open-source project. In the old economic models of competition it makes plenty of sense to have many different competing entities bringing products to market; this competition makes the products better and cheaper for consumers. But in the open-source world the fundamentals change. Spending money on a competitive codebase like the Sakai project has is giant waste of money. If the $6M would have been invested in making Moodle better instead of creating a new product from scratch the world of open-source LMS/CMS's would have been multitudes better off.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Richard Wyles - Wednesday, 1 March 2006, 4:02 PM

Zack, Sakai was in the early planning stages around the same time as Moodle had less than a few hundred installations. So to be fair, there was no way of knowing that Moodle would be so well adopted back then, and there were heaps of options, still is.

Check out Shortlisting , Part II and Technical Evaluation to see how much work we (NZVLE) did back then to select Moodle to work on. It's a lot more clear-cut now but there were a number of interesting candidates back at that stage - e.g. Atutor, Ilias etc. We discounted Sakai early because of the core college concept (US centric at the time).

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Ben Brophy - Thursday, 11 May 2006, 10:43 AM

I just thought this would make y'all happy.

Moodle vs. Sakai in Google Trends:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=sakai%2C+moodle&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Michael Penney - Thursday, 11 May 2006, 12:53 PM

Thanks Ben, it's interesting that Sakai has all the right side links on the 'trend' report page, regardless of whether one does moodle, sakai or sakai, moodle.

Do you know if those are paid placements?

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by David Scotson - Thursday, 11 May 2006, 8:05 PM

Those are just results from Google News and Google. Moodle occasionally makes it into Google News stories but it seems like it's never got its name into the headline.

But these things can be misleading, note for example that the story about Hyperformix is about them appointing someone called Mr. Sakai as their chief financial officer.

Moodle has a very unique name so it is actually undereported compared with Sakai and (even more so) Blackboard. The Moodle vs. WebCT graph was of most interesting to me because it removes these confounding factors to a great degree.

(Amusing aside, I tried the three programming languages, Ruby, Perl and Python and noticed a really big spike for Python. Following the little lettered flag to the related news story it turned out to be because people were searching for pictures and video of a actual python that had tried eat an alligator and exploded. So beware about making extrapolatins from these results)

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Dirk Herr-Hoyman - Thursday, 11 May 2006, 8:17 PM

I read the right side of this trend report as being "press releases".
They are all from Sakai, which I would take to mean Sakai has better press release channels.

This sort of report would be used by Marketing types who want to gauge the effect of a media campaign that uses press releases.

Now I'm going to see what happens with Second Life and Croquet :->

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by A. T. Wyatt - Thursday, 11 May 2006, 8:01 PM

Change the region to another country and you will get a little different graph. Most countries don't seem to have enough data to produce a graph on their own. If you choose United States, you will see that Moodle still exceeds Sakai, but not quite as dramatically.

The Moodle series starts diverging from the Sakai series in Sept/Oct 2004. Was that when 1.4 was released?

I don't think those links on the right are necessarily paid advertisements. If you look at 2004 results for all regions, you will see a story about a MAN named Sakai! I think it has more to do with which news services they index.

Anyway, it was interesting! Thanks for the link!
atw

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by David Scotson - Thursday, 11 May 2006, 8:27 PM

Sorting by language or country is cool, though the order of terms seems to matter e.g. if you do Moodle, WebCT & Sakai but put Sakai first you get these regions (spot the connection?):

Viet Nam
Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Korea
Hong Kong
Thailand
Philippines
Japan
Taiwan

Moodle on the other hand seems to be going strong in Spanish speaking areas.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Jim Farmer - Thursday, 11 May 2006, 9:33 PM

As Dirk points out, the references often come from press releases. Business Wire is followed by every high-tech journalist and many who want to be current; always high on accesses and searches. The Sakai press releases are from a number of colleges and universities; Google gives higher credibility and placement to information from higher educations. This indirectly affects the data about searches.

The regional distribution reflects underlying activities. There is a UN-sponsored consortium in Southeast Asia that has focused on Moodle implementations. Hence the increased activity in that region. Viet-Nam uses uPortal and uPortal users tend to be interested in Sakai because of assumed compatibility. (The ESUP Portail group is a significant exception with integrated uPortal and Moodle).

The MoodleMoot in Spain last year was especially successful. There are Moodle implementations based on both the Moot attendance itself and those who had access to the Spanish-language materials that were made available from the Moot. (And the Spanish version of Moodle).

What these statistics show is the different nature of the Moodle community and the Sakai partners. The Moodle community is predominantly teachers and faculty who are interested in implementation; the Sakai community continues to focus on software development. This difference was discussed at the April OSS Watch Conference in Oxford and deserves further study. My colleague Jon Allen is now beginning to analyze the difference in topics presented at the MoodleMoots and the Sakai conferences to see if it is significant. Another factor of the MoodleMoot success--more than 2,000 attended last year--is a combination of local meetings and low cost--factors that enable teachers and faculty to attend at their own expense.

The original statistics and the subsequent discussion furthers our knowledge of how cooperatively all of us can improve eLearning. A point Ben Brophy made earlier in this thread. And his optimism about what can be done continues as he follows both Sakai and Moodle. Thanks Ben for the latest.

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Re: Sakai Vs. Moodle

by Don Hinkelman - Friday, 12 May 2006, 8:27 AM

>>Another factor of the MoodleMoot success--more than 2,000 attended last year--is a combination of local meetings and low cost--factors that enable teachers and faculty to attend at their own expense.

Woefully understated! Last year, in Japan alone, in the language teaching sector alone, in the foreign community alone, 200-300 attended moodle sessions in the JALT National conference, 150 attended one of 15 moodle sessions at the JALTCALL conference, and 110 attended local moodle training workshops on one island, Hokkaido. Who knows how many attended in total across Japan and across all sectors? Thousands?

And yes, these are teachers attending at their own expense or with travel funds from their schools. Since teaching association conferences allow any teacher or commercial group to submit a presentation proposal, the number of Moodle presentations grows organically and exponentially. Oddly, in the past three years I have seen or heard of none from Sakai, one from Blackboard, none from WebCT, and over 100 from Moodle. My rough guess is that about 80% of the sessions are about using Moodle or documenting classroom research with Moodle. And 20% are development-related sessions. In Japan, we have developed about eight modules or modifications for Moodle.

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