General help

I'll take a stab at answering my own question:

As a developer with multiple servers and fixed IP addresses to work with,
I could indeed cobble together a working courseware package (from open
source modules) for me alone to use. I could imagine doing this in a week
or less.

What would not be so easy to duplicate would be the global administrative
wrapper that differentiates between admin, teacher, student, etc,
with matching privilege sets to go with.

One slogan I like for Moodle is "Letting teachers harness the power of the internet".

Nothing Moodle does is really rocket science, but it is all there in one package, and one package that is designed for teaching. It recognises that the site is divided into courses, and there are fundamentally two different types of user - teachers and students. And teacher want to be able to track, and grade, what students are doing. Wikipedia, for example, does not have that assumption. There, all users are, more or less, equal.

Therefore, the difference is really in the non-functional requirements. Also in the background is the general approach explained on Pedagogy.

"So it occurred to me I (as a developer) could cobble most
of the above list together with a variety of third-party open source tools."

I think the key word here is cobble, I "could" build an extension to my house, but I'd be very wise not to. The number and quality of open source quiz systems is not high, and I speak as someone who spent several years creating one of my own.

There are various ways of integrating moodle with cms systems that you might find useful.

I agree with the others comments. Essentially it comes down to the experience. You could cobble those things together. They would all look slightly different, work slightly differently, have different phrases for common tasks etc. They would also all be very feature rich, probably too much so.

So what you would end up with is a system that is very complex and rather inconsistent. In short, I would not want to use it, and I would dread having to teach teachers how to use it. I would even more dread having to maintain it.

Imagine having to theme the thing. I would have to learn and maintain several different theming layouts.

And when a teacher says "hey it would be cool to be able to do X", instead of just looking in the addons database, and if it's there, downloading it and installing it, I now have to find an application and then hack it to suit. If it doesn't exist I can create it but it's easier to create around the Moodle framework than to do so from scratch.

(and regarding the comment of the text editor: I believe 2.0 has a much improved editor)

Hi Sandy,

I'd go more with Tim on this one. When I first saw this post I immediately thought of the opposite - what does it NOT bring to the table? Firstly, it's a single application and therefore it should require less support than multiple open source pieces linked together. It's an area that interests me - I call it cost-effective pedagogy - the idea that I use anything that will get the job done with the most efficiency. Properly applied it does not allow for time to be wasted on competing ideas and so the real job of the software, better educating people, can continue.

Returning to your question, for me it:

a) provides a single easily customisible platform;
b) promotes e-learning in a format better suited than many commercial applications;
c) promotes real discussion of the aims of specific pedagogies - in other words, makes me think about what and how I'm trying to teach.

Hope this helps,

Paul