I've spent most of the last month ignoring my adminstrative duties while I learned some things about moodle, php, mysql and such. My changes to the new college catalog are a week overdue, but this has been time well misspent.
We have a WebCT server. We have about a 1,000 students taking classes on it. I am teaching two classes this semester on it. Last fall, WebCT let us know that the license agreement they had negotiated with the two-year college association in Arkansas had expired: our yearly license fees would increase from 1,000 to 10,000 dollars a year.
So, I've gone looking for a new solution. Moodle is a good start, but I can't sell it to a faculty that is mostly technologically naive and trained in WebCT. Microsoft had the same problem--Windows NT frightened everyone because it was not Windows 95 or Windows 98. So, Microsoft upgraded Windows NT and called it Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
Any good ideas about selling Moodle to a distance education committee that is dtermined to have WebCT or Blackboard would be a real help.
I have such admiration for open source anything. There was a time when open source meant reading a lot of poorly written HOWTOs, but any more a query to Google generally helps solve the problem. I'd really like to see this work.