Moodle in English: It it for me (or vice versa)/compare with V bulletin

Comparisons and advocacy

It it for me (or vice versa)/compare with V bulletin

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It it for me (or vice versa)/compare with V bulletin

by kathy page - Thursday, August 28, 2008, 3:55 AM

I have used moodle as a teacher in an institutional context before, and now want to set up independently with a couple of my own online courses. All I want to setup is the ability to post a lesson and assignment each week and have a weekly forum for students to post their assignments for peer discussion. No gradebooks, marking assingments etc. There would be several small forums rater than one big one, so I'd have to be able to put the students into self-contained groups within the course. It needs to be easy for the students to get in etc, as many will be unfamiliar with online learning.

So, is Moodle overkill? The administration, which was done for me before, is a big unknown and something of a deterrent since my familiarity/skills/confidence with such things is low. Am I right in thinking this could take a person like me a very long time to get to grips with?

Someone I know is using V bulletin for the same kind of thing (there is telephone help there, at a price) - would that be better?

Thanks

Re: It it for me (or vice versa)/compare with V bulletin

by Glenys Hanson - Friday, August 29, 2008, 3:05 PM

Hello Kathy,

I'm afraid I don't know anything about V bulletin, but as for Moodle I'd suggest you download it onto your own computer and practice being an administrator on a local version. I'm just a teacher and I didn't find it very difficult. I just use the bits I need and add others as I go along. You find it at http://download.moodle.org/windows/ and documentation about this package in Moodle Docs.

To run a course you have to have Moodle hosted on a server somewhere. There are free ones but you have to set it up yourself or pay/get someone else to do so. That's the bit that's too techie for me. I'm an administrator for a small association and we pay for hosting.

Many of our users are not used to the Internet and need a lot of hand-holding to understand about how to log on the first time: passwords, usernames, confirmation emails, etc. but I think you would have the same problem with any system that is password protected. I've had to write step-by-step tutorials with screenshots to help them.

Cheers,
Glenys

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