Looking at Kaleidos - Any advice?

Looking at Kaleidos - Any advice?

by James Marshall -
Number of replies: 4

We have been using Moodle for around 4 years now and have been happy until now. I have just been given the task of looking into alternatives and have had Kaleidos suggested to me as we are an "RM college". I haven't seen Kaleidos for years so I have no idea how it's features have changed. I know this is a Moodle forum but I am interested to know how it compares to Moodle, particularly:

  • Is there anywhere I can get a complete feature list from?
  • Are there any features that Kaleidos has that Moodle doesn't or visa verca?
  • Are there any major (i.e. showstopping) issues with Kaleidos?
  • What is the integration with SIMS.net like?

Are any of you running Kaleidos, if so would you be willing to post some images or video of how it looks?

Again, I know this is a Moodle forum but if you could hold off the Kaleidos bashing for another topic I would apreciate it smile I am just interested in the differences and if moving to Kaleidos would be good for us.

Thanks for your input,
James

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In reply to James Marshall

Re: Looking at Kaleidos - Any advice?

by Matt Gibson -
The Kaleidos guy came and showed the system to us last year and the only thing he could point to which was better was the way that it was able to tag things as relevant to various key stages etc so that you could quickly find resources. With Global search enabled, however, this doesn't mean much as searching is far superior to sorting any day. Many of the socially rich features of Moodle were not there or not as good and of course the big showstopper is that it costs money and locks you in.

The support with Kaleidos from RM needs a direct comparison with SLAs from Moodle partners, whic is probably cheaper, and the whole support community like docs.moodle.org being linked to from every page, the Moodle forums, and the third party modules and plugins are all missing.

Kaleidos will integrate with SIMS in the same way as every other VLE, i.e. not very well. You can get data out of SIMS, but not put it in and this is based on our BSF IT partners not being able to do any better even with Fronter as their official VLE. SIMS just doesn't allow it. Also, Moodle currently can be integrated with SIMS as far as is possible - see here for details.

The big question is what is the motivation for considering it? Does Moodle fail on some count or is the Kaleidos marketing guy persuading you, or is it lack of support etc. Whether it's a good idea to switch really depends mostly on that.
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In reply to Matt Gibson

Re: Looking at Kaleidos - Any advice?

by James Marshall -

Thansk for your reply Matt smile

From what I keep hearing, Kaleidos doesn't seem to step up to the mark at any stange and Moodle seems to be far more superior. Are there any areas which you like in Kaleidos but not in Moodle?

I don't think cost or support is going to be an issue to be honest and from what I hear we are being leaned on to take Kaleidos for reasons I can't really go into here. Basically the LEA is rolling it out county wide and we need to look at adopting it within the next 12-18 months. I don't think I will have much sway either way to be honest but I need to make an informed argument to the SMT soon.

I am currently maintaining our Moodle installation but have become very weary of the open source side of it. There are, as you say, some nice modules but as we have our whole College on Moodle trusting the security and reliability of community made plugins can be problematic at times. Plus there are a few major niggles that as a web designer & developer I find very unprofessional. For example:

  • Single Sign On only works 50% of the time. It is very slow and takes you to 1 or 2 different pages before you have access to the VLE.
  • The web forms throughout Moodle are not nicely laid out.
  • It uses HTML Area to create courses and topics with nasty HTML code underneath it.
  • We constantly have problems with studen't not being able to login from home.
  • There are constant performance issues.

All of these I have tried time and time again to sort out and some of which are bugs with either IIS, PHP or Moodle itself. These are just some of the reasons I'm not too keen on Moodle and think a commercial product like Kaleidos, which includes dedicated technical support by the people who developed it, would be much better for us.

Don't get me wrong, I love what Moodle can do and some of the features are fantastic but I just can't shake this feeling of it being slightly hmm......unprofessional?? Maybe that's the wrong word....

James

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In reply to James Marshall

Re: Looking at Kaleidos - Any advice?

by Jon Witts -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Hi James,

Our LEA (East Riding of Yorkshire) have also rolled out RM Kaleidos and their Learning Platform county wide. The majority of schools who have been using Moodle previously are choosing to stay with Moodle and NOT adopt the Kaleidos VLE.

You should know that the LEA can NOT insist you use a specific platform; that choice is down to the school.

A lot of the points you raise regarding niggles with Moodle sound more like server and installation errors rather than Moodle problems. We have single sign on working every time with no home access issues. Perhaps more info about the single sign on issues in the relevant forums would lead to a resolution. The performance problems should probably be addresses in the hardware forums...

I can not disagree with your points about HTML area; however do not expect anything better with Kaleidos! At least Moodle strives to be xhtml complaint (on first log in to the RM Learning Platform it has 266 errors!)

I found the support from RM (with many of their products) to be lacking and often find that solutions are posted quicker through the open source model of forums than through dedicated help desk support.

The feature set of Moodle certainly out-weighs the feature set of RM; and the SIMS integration is poor at best.

One point that RM has over Moodle for me is the automatic generation of parental logins and the reporting of student data from SIMS back to parents. If we can find a way to do this with Moodle and SIMS then I am sure we will have no need for the RM platform at all!

Just my two cents worth; hope it is of some help.

Jon
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In reply to James Marshall

Re: Looking at Kaleidos - Any advice?

by Matt Gibson -
Well, I didn't spend any real time investigating Kaleidos beyond that initial presentation, so I didn't really find anything that I liked better about it.

The LEA thing I would suggest is to be avoided like the plague as once you've moved over, it will be hard to move back. You are surrendering all control to an outside agency and as teachers inevitably become more skilled and demand better tools, you will be a bit stuck.

As for the shortcomings you list, I agree with all of them! Many are fixable ro fixed though:
  • SSO is fixed as of last week, provided you use MSIE in school, use LDAP and have the MSIE fast path setting turned on. Upgrade to the latest CVS code to try it.
  • Web forms are a pain, agreed, but this is being discussed right now and hopefully will change in Moodle 2.0 which will be along within a year
  • HTML area has already been replaced with TinyMCE in the Moodle 2.0 code and is Sooo much better! Download the 2.0 dev code snapshot to try it out.
  • Home logins - do you have a self signed SSL certificate? This is causing headaches for us, but it's not really Moodle, more a case of over-zealous anti-virus at home.
  • Performance - this should not be a problem with a properly set up system. I can help you fix it if you use Windows, or else check the performace docs or the hradware and performance forum (if you haven't already). How do you host Moodle?
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