Moodle Suitability

Moodle Suitability

by Dave Thompson -
Number of replies: 4
Hi,

Hope everyone's having a great day so far. I'm hoping to get some feedback on whether Moodle might be a suitable system for a pilot project our school district is participating in. We're currently running an enhanced learning program for Junior Kindergarten to Grade Eight students on weekends between September and June and a seven-week summer program from July to Mid-August. This program is offered at 18 school sites with about 4500 students in total. Enrolment per site varies, ranging from as little as 100 students to as many as 1200 students.

Here are some of the things that we hope to do with Moodle:
  1. Replace our antiquated student management system (we currently distribute individual MS Access DB files to each site and they manually manipulate it using Microsoft Access; we then periodically ask them to provide us with the updated DB file via e-mail). With a centralized Moodle system, we're hoping to eliminate a lot of this extra work.

  2. The student management system will store information such as student name, gender, address, home school, bussing requirements, parent/guardian contact, medical contact/info, core program, elective programs, area for additional notes and payment information.

  3. Set up an online registration portal where parents can register their child(ren) from home or at work. Parents sign their kids up for a core program and four elective programs. There is a small consumables fee that parents pay upon registering and we'd like to be able to accept credit card payments via Moodle when we're ready. During the transition period, we may allow parents to register without paying immediately and instead ask them to pay in-person during the first day. As such, a paid/unpaid toggle per student would be useful.

  4. For parents who choose to register through our traditional paper method, we're hoping that we can manually register students into the Moodle system once they have paid their consumables fee.

  5. School Administrators would have the ability to manage their respective school location through Moodle - such as managing all data pertaining to their location, registration and enrolment, printing local receipts and reports adding/removing programs, assigning/managing teachers, manage staff and student timetables, classroom assistants, communicate with staff, students and parents via e-newsletters/forums/announcements, collaborate with administrators and staff across all 18 sites etc...

  6. Teachers and teaching assistants will be able to manage the core and elective programs they are teaching - such as downloading district-provided material, collaborating with other staff (both locally and across all 18 sites) via online forums, managing student lists, attendance, contacting their students' parents via e-newsletters, manually inputting grades, automatically inputting grades from e-quizzes/assignments, printing periodic grade reports, uploading material/assignments for students to complete, class calendars, retrieving student work etc...

  7. In some core and elective programs, particularly those being offered to Grade 6-8 students, we're hoping to use Moodle as a teaching tool. From our experience, intermediate students are computer-literate and they would benefit from direct interaction with Moodle, just like many secondary and post-secondary students. Moodle will likely be reserved for teacher-use when it comes to programs designed for younger grades.

  8. At the school district level, we hope to be able to manage the entire Moodle system and all of its functions across the 18 school locations. We hope to be able to generate reports such as student enrolment, collected fees, staffing details etc... These reports will be imported by different district departments such as Curriculum Services and Finance (importing into Quicken/Excel) etc...
Based on the basic modules available in Moodle, along with a library of modules created by the Moodle community, it looks as though all of these features are available. Minor tweaks may be necessary but it looks doable.

What's important though is ease-of-use for all users, reliability and security. People will not use the system if there's a large learning curve or if it's not reliable. Data security, after all reasonable measures are taken, is a must since there is sensitive information on the system.

Has anyone used Moodle for one to this kind of scale? Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and have a wonderful day!

- Dave
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Dave Thompson

Re: Moodle Suitability

by Gary Anderson -
Dave:

I think that you are better off thinking of Moodle as a "course management system" rather than a "student management system" or a "school management system". You need to decide if you want to adapt the course management system to try to server these other needs.

In any case, make sure that you give two or three years for a learning curve with things working as you want in only certain courses at first, and make sure that you staff the IT department to do the level of customization and selection of other tools (which you may also find in open source software) to fully meet your list of needs and desires.

--Gary

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Gary Anderson

Re: Moodle Suitability

by Dave Thompson -
Hi Gary,

Thanks for the feedback. I greatly appreciate it.

It looks as if we may need to run multiple systems to accomplish our objectives. The school district itself uses commercial software such as LearnFlex, e-SIS and Blackboard to manage day-to-day operations across the district. Unfortunately, our small pilot program does not have access to these systems nor do we have the funding to acquire such software. The costs of facilities, staff and program delivery take up a majority of the funding provided to us.

As such, we're forced to be a little creative, which really isn't that bad if we look at things optimistically. We're lucky to have the support of IT staff during off-peak hours and limited access to IT infrastructure to try things out. Who knows, if we're able to demonstrate that open-source software can effectively replace these commercial packages, the district might consider shifting away from commercial software in the future for school management.

In the mean time, using the feedback that you and others have provided throughout the forums, we're currently taking a look at using several individual systems and periodic batch imports/exports to exchange data between them. We're testing/exploring the following open-source packages:
  1. Online Program Enrolment - OSCommerce - Interestingly enough, based on a preliminary assessment and feedback from other users on the Moodle forum, it looks like OSCommerce is capable of allowing parents to register their children in our pilot program. We can setup core classes and electives using product/product categories, use Product Quantity to manage available enrolment spaces remaining in real-time etc... When we're ready to accept Credit Card payments for consumable fees, OSCommerce's transaction processing capabilities will come in handy. The IT staff are currently testing out whether or not they can export OSCommerce data and import it into the SIS but it's looking optimistic.

  2. Student Information System - OpenAdmin, Centre/SIS and OpenSIS - in terms of functionality and scalability, we like OpenAdmin. However, OpenSIS and Centre/SIS are more user-friendly for teachers and parents than OpenAdmin. Centre/SIS runs only on PostgreSQL, which the district does not support and OpenSIS looks to be designed for a Windows-server environment, which we don't have access to for our pilot program. The IT Staff are highly recommending OpenAdmin but they're trying to figure out if student data such as Grades and Scheduled classes can be exported to Moodle and vice versa.

  3. E-Learning Platform - Moodle, of course smile - The school administrators along with many of the teachers involved with the pilot program have expressed interest in using Moodle to enhance student learning starting in the 2009 summer session. As mentioned in the original post, some of the older students will have direct interaction with Moodle to supplement in-class component. For all staff, it looks like Moodle can act as a collaboration tool. We're a little concerned about the importing/exporting of data between the SIS and Moodle but I'm sure it's doable.
Some other neat pieces of software that were brought to our attention include: CivicCRM (which could be an alternative to OSCommerce) and eGroupware (just in case Moodle can't handle staff collaboration effectively). After some "convincing," the supervisory officers are willing to consider setting up a separate SharePoint space for us but that's still pending.

I'm sure that some form of integration between the systems is possible, maybe through an ERP system, but the IT staff won't have time to develop something like that. It'll also cost at least $5K to have something developed with an outside firm so we'll have to live with the importing/exporting for now.

The pilot program ends in two more years, after which the school district will conduct a full review to determine the program's success. If the program is deemed successful, it could become permanent and we'll have access to more funding and resources to integrate everything together.

Any additional feedback would be greatly appreciated but I'd thought I share our progress with everyone.

Thanks again for the help.

Best regards,

Dave
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Dave Thompson

Re: Moodle Suitability

by Tran The Trung -
I would like to hear about your prgress. Please update us with your news Dave.
Average of ratings: -