Moodle In the Chronicle of Higher Education

Moodle In the Chronicle of Higher Education

by Michael Penney -
Number of replies: 2
It was great to see Moodle prominently featured in this weeks chron., which devoted a section to Open Source projects. Of course they had the seemingly obligatory discussion of what Sakai is going to do whenever its ready, but they had a nice blurb about Moodle in a sampling section, first in the list, with a nice quote from Bryan Williams.

The section repeated some of the usual FUD about OSS, for instance this gem: "support costs can often be as much as 75-80% of what it would cost to buy and maintain an expensive software package from a company" whew, well if you chose the wrong OSS package, I guess, but "often"? Oddly this claim wasn't actually supported by their articles, in which most of the folks using OSS reported that it was comparable in support costs to similar CSS.

And there is a nice little piece from Microsoft about how OSS may 'financially undermine the future of research'. Uh huh, and it causes global warming, too!wink.

But overall there were some very nice articles about some interesting projects, and that nice blurb about Moodle.

PS, is this why the site is so slow today??smile
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Moodle In the Chronicle of Higher Education

by Richard Treves -
Michael,

The global warming was a nice shot at microsoft but it reminded me of some research a collegue of mine started.  He was looking at the environmental cost of an online course compared with a traditional distance learning, paper course.  I think he came to the conclusion they were pretty much the same when you considered disposal of PCs and electricity...

anyone know anything more?

Richard
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Moodle In the Chronicle of Higher Education

by Frances Bell -
This article briefly mentions moodle, and outlines pros rather than cons of using OSS for e-learning.
http://www.campus-technology.com/news_article.asp?id=10299&typeid=155 
I thought that moodle was a bit understated.  Article also included LAMS as OSS, and I know that earlier discussions have indicated that this isn't the case.
Average of ratings: -