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April,
I'm glad you posted this question.
We have been using Moodle for nearly two years now as a component of our training courses in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. We began online classes in 2000 and have always used a company based in Toronto, Embanet, to hosting and technical support. In 2007, Embanet gave us the opportunity to switch over from another platform to Moodle. The switch was a huge challenge, but we are pleased with it. I have not used another CMS, so I can't compare with those. We are pleased with the technical support that Embanet provides - they are very responsive. We are a very small program and do not have in-house IT, so the tech support was very important to me.
Once established, the moodle format is flexible and is more powerful than we probably need. I do have trouble uploading sometimes, but Embanet always helps me out when something comes up. There are some features that our instructors aren't completely happy with, but overall we like it a lot. The gradebook is especially helpful.
I am considering using moodle further as a support to our onground courses. Embanet's fee for this is rather high (I think) and I'm considering hiring someone here to do that for me.
Bernice Ege-Zavala
School of Teaching ESL, Director
bezavala@seattleu.edu
I'm glad you posted this question.
We have been using Moodle for nearly two years now as a component of our training courses in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. We began online classes in 2000 and have always used a company based in Toronto, Embanet, to hosting and technical support. In 2007, Embanet gave us the opportunity to switch over from another platform to Moodle. The switch was a huge challenge, but we are pleased with it. I have not used another CMS, so I can't compare with those. We are pleased with the technical support that Embanet provides - they are very responsive. We are a very small program and do not have in-house IT, so the tech support was very important to me.
Once established, the moodle format is flexible and is more powerful than we probably need. I do have trouble uploading sometimes, but Embanet always helps me out when something comes up. There are some features that our instructors aren't completely happy with, but overall we like it a lot. The gradebook is especially helpful.
I am considering using moodle further as a support to our onground courses. Embanet's fee for this is rather high (I think) and I'm considering hiring someone here to do that for me.
Bernice Ege-Zavala
School of Teaching ESL, Director
bezavala@seattleu.edu
Johns Hopkins began migrating from WebCT 4.1 because, at the time, it was due to be phased out, the new Bb-WebCT product had no definite info, and it looked like we would have to do an expensive in-between upgrade.
My division went with Moodle. Other divisions are making their own choices. We used a host (Moodlerooms) for about half a year, but we began running our own server a year ago. We now use our own server as the primary server. We use maybe one tenth of an IT person for Moodle.
The community provides good technical support, but also good pedagogy support and an amazing variety of plug-ins and modules.
Moodle allows you to totally rethink the use of a cms and the design of your courses.
The only major technical item I dislike about it is that you cannot import a csv to the calendar, which makes that module far too artisinal for my organization. We mass produce classrooms.
Once you get off Bb, you'll never go back. There are lots of comparison documents out there. Shop around!
My division went with Moodle. Other divisions are making their own choices. We used a host (Moodlerooms) for about half a year, but we began running our own server a year ago. We now use our own server as the primary server. We use maybe one tenth of an IT person for Moodle.
The community provides good technical support, but also good pedagogy support and an amazing variety of plug-ins and modules.
Moodle allows you to totally rethink the use of a cms and the design of your courses.
The only major technical item I dislike about it is that you cannot import a csv to the calendar, which makes that module far too artisinal for my organization. We mass produce classrooms.
Once you get off Bb, you'll never go back. There are lots of comparison documents out there. Shop around!
Hello -
I'm looking into MoodleRooms because we are unable to move to run our own server at this point. I'd be interested in hearing feedback on technical support and customer service from Moodlerooms. Are people satisfied with their service?
Thank you,
Bernice Ege-Zavala
School of Teaching ESL
Seattle, WA
I'm looking into MoodleRooms because we are unable to move to run our own server at this point. I'd be interested in hearing feedback on technical support and customer service from Moodlerooms. Are people satisfied with their service?
Thank you,
Bernice Ege-Zavala
School of Teaching ESL
Seattle, WA
Hi Bernice,
I'm not sure this is the best place to ask about MoodleRooms.
Disclaimer: MR's main office is in a building owned by Johns Hopkins, and I know the CEO, Martin Knott, having met him at Delhi Moodle Moot last June.
I can say that our experience has always been cordial and cooperative, within the limits of any provider. For example, we typically got positive & quick response to the very few tech issues we ran into. One of their people gave us a good hour's worth of hands on training, which got us up and running and showed us what & how to investigate further.
Speaking for myself (not my boss or my division of JHU), the limitation on hosting is that you can't fool around w/ the database and you need to do a lot of talking to get non-standard modules/plug-ins. I wouldn't let me muck around in the database either, and I wouldn't want to support non-standard stuff.
But, eventually, users find reasons to be in the database & to use non-standard stuff & that makes running (& endangering) your own Moodle a requirement. Thus, our primary server is now our own.
I'm not sure this is the best place to ask about MoodleRooms.
Disclaimer: MR's main office is in a building owned by Johns Hopkins, and I know the CEO, Martin Knott, having met him at Delhi Moodle Moot last June.
I can say that our experience has always been cordial and cooperative, within the limits of any provider. For example, we typically got positive & quick response to the very few tech issues we ran into. One of their people gave us a good hour's worth of hands on training, which got us up and running and showed us what & how to investigate further.
Speaking for myself (not my boss or my division of JHU), the limitation on hosting is that you can't fool around w/ the database and you need to do a lot of talking to get non-standard modules/plug-ins. I wouldn't let me muck around in the database either, and I wouldn't want to support non-standard stuff.
But, eventually, users find reasons to be in the database & to use non-standard stuff & that makes running (& endangering) your own Moodle a requirement. Thus, our primary server is now our own.
Hi April,
I started off with Blackboard while at St. Mary's College of Maryland where as the Learning Systems Specialist for the campus I not only trained faculty and students but also acted as the Blackboard Administrator. Blackboard adoption on campus was quite rapid by the faculty, however we were always limited by what Blackboard said we could do with our license.
I started consulting with Art Center College of Design last fall who was piloting Moodle and I've since come on board full time as their Educational Technologist where I'm managing the campus Moodle implementation. I also authored the Moodle Essential Training for Teachers and Students at lynda.com earlier this spring.
Given my experience with both platforms I'd say that both are equally easy to learn to use for both faculty and students. The adoption rate at both institutions that I've worked with on the two platforms have been very similar and it really comes down to planning the roll out and gaining buyin from the faculty early in the process.
At Art Center we started off with a hosted solution for 2 semesters and then brought Moodle in house. This was a great plan for us as it was very quick and easy to get Moodle up and running during our early beta testing with a hosted solution, but once we brought Moodle in house we really started to reap the benefits. We had no hardware or software costs what so ever since we were able to leverage all of our existing infrastructure for Moodle. We tied Moodle to our campus LDAP and Single Signon Server (CAS) and are in process of integrating Moodle with our campus Portal based on uPortal. We are using Oracle as our back end database for Moodle, data storage is our SAN and are running Moodle on a Linux cluster of virtual servers. We have had zero downtime and the complete setup and conversion from hosted to on campus took only about 2 weeks, much of which was testing.
With Moodle tied to CAS we get the added benefits of being able to pass students directly to other services we have on campus such as iTunes U and our site license for lynda.com.
Bringing Moodle in house was a critical concern for us so we could reduce bandwidth usage between campus and hosting provider. We get much better performance on campus as we share files mostly on our campus intranet rather than the commercial internet. As an Art School we are pushing quite a lot of a data through Moodle in terms of images, audio and video and so far we haven't seen any problems.
As far as training and support the Moodle community is fantastic at responding to questions and the documentation already online is really quite good.
I started off with Blackboard while at St. Mary's College of Maryland where as the Learning Systems Specialist for the campus I not only trained faculty and students but also acted as the Blackboard Administrator. Blackboard adoption on campus was quite rapid by the faculty, however we were always limited by what Blackboard said we could do with our license.
I started consulting with Art Center College of Design last fall who was piloting Moodle and I've since come on board full time as their Educational Technologist where I'm managing the campus Moodle implementation. I also authored the Moodle Essential Training for Teachers and Students at lynda.com earlier this spring.
Given my experience with both platforms I'd say that both are equally easy to learn to use for both faculty and students. The adoption rate at both institutions that I've worked with on the two platforms have been very similar and it really comes down to planning the roll out and gaining buyin from the faculty early in the process.
At Art Center we started off with a hosted solution for 2 semesters and then brought Moodle in house. This was a great plan for us as it was very quick and easy to get Moodle up and running during our early beta testing with a hosted solution, but once we brought Moodle in house we really started to reap the benefits. We had no hardware or software costs what so ever since we were able to leverage all of our existing infrastructure for Moodle. We tied Moodle to our campus LDAP and Single Signon Server (CAS) and are in process of integrating Moodle with our campus Portal based on uPortal. We are using Oracle as our back end database for Moodle, data storage is our SAN and are running Moodle on a Linux cluster of virtual servers. We have had zero downtime and the complete setup and conversion from hosted to on campus took only about 2 weeks, much of which was testing.
With Moodle tied to CAS we get the added benefits of being able to pass students directly to other services we have on campus such as iTunes U and our site license for lynda.com.
Bringing Moodle in house was a critical concern for us so we could reduce bandwidth usage between campus and hosting provider. We get much better performance on campus as we share files mostly on our campus intranet rather than the commercial internet. As an Art School we are pushing quite a lot of a data through Moodle in terms of images, audio and video and so far we haven't seen any problems.
As far as training and support the Moodle community is fantastic at responding to questions and the documentation already online is really quite good.
Chris, great response. As mostly a lurker just getting my feet wet with Moodle and no collaborative support, I appreciate it.
Paul
Paul
April,
As a teacher I have had experience with BlackBoard, Moodle and a couple of other CMS systems. I have found Moodle to be the most user friendly as a teacher. It has also had the additional benefit that we can use it for whatever we want. There are no restrictions because of licensing issues or additional costs. We use it not only for courses but for posting curriculum for teacher access, district wide surveys, Specialists posting and sharing resources and Professional Development Training. If the IT Director had more time to spend on it, I'm sure we could do even more with it. We have a great IT Director so we have ours housed on site, but there are hosting companies available if you need that to get started.
There are also several organizations available to help with initial training. (I got mine through MoodleRooms.)
Paula Clough
The short answer is that it has been useful to me as a teacher and that I can do it myself for free. (I have some background with networks but I'm just a high school teacher)
A few years ago there were free Blackboard accounts for teachers. I used it for a course, it wasn't bad but one day the terms of service changed i.e. they wanted money so I let it go.
I found Moodle easy to set up, reliable, does the job. And I like the freedom I have especially that I now own my own content and can take it anywhere if I need to. Extrapolating to a larger scale a big problem with Blackboard is that it costs $ that may not be there every year. Teachers don't like putting the time it takes to set up courses when they can disappear. Less likely with Moodle because it costs a lot less $.
As for hosting, I'm pretty small scale, couple hundred users so far and am hosting it myself at 110mb.com. Our district should be running a moodle this coming year and I may move.
If you are a college you have IT folks. You might consider hosting yourself. A box, a technician and some free software and a couple of hours time for a basic set up if you know what you are doing and you are going. That is if you want to administer the thing yourself.
good luck
A few years ago there were free Blackboard accounts for teachers. I used it for a course, it wasn't bad but one day the terms of service changed i.e. they wanted money so I let it go.
I found Moodle easy to set up, reliable, does the job. And I like the freedom I have especially that I now own my own content and can take it anywhere if I need to. Extrapolating to a larger scale a big problem with Blackboard is that it costs $ that may not be there every year. Teachers don't like putting the time it takes to set up courses when they can disappear. Less likely with Moodle because it costs a lot less $.
As for hosting, I'm pretty small scale, couple hundred users so far and am hosting it myself at 110mb.com. Our district should be running a moodle this coming year and I may move.
If you are a college you have IT folks. You might consider hosting yourself. A box, a technician and some free software and a couple of hours time for a basic set up if you know what you are doing and you are going. That is if you want to administer the thing yourself.
good luck