Comparisons and advocacy

Introducing my new best friend...Ben!!!! Oh please can you let us know how it was done... please!!!! Although, WordPress and Elgg covers a lot of similar gound... how about MediaWiki and Mahara, (without creating a Mahoodle). I am arguing all the time that this is the very kind of intersecting technology we really should be using rather than relying upon outdated and restrictive commercial software.

The entire Cal State University System is offering Moodle to its schools. I know that San Fransisco State, Humboldt State, Cal State Monterey Bay, and several others have gone 100% Moodle.

http://campustechnology.com/articles/2008/11/csu-system-adopts-moodle-lms-services.aspx

Ben, can you tel us some more about your integration with Wordpress? It is login integration or more things are integrated?

Seems to me that many people who manage technology at US colleges and universities want reassurance that others are using Moodle successfully before adopting it for use by their own institution.  The fascinating - and crucial - question for Moodle adoption seems to be this:  Am I confident that Moodle will work?  For people who know technology, their answer seems to be, "I can see the source code and judge Moodle to be sound."  But for people who don't know technology, they have no way of judging except to ask what others' experiences are.  And of course there are plenty of vendors of commercial technology with slick salespeople ready to provide reassurance - and someone external to blame when things go wrong.

I personally have had great experience with the Moodle partners in the US (Remote-Learner especially), but it seems as though even that level of support isn't enough for some institutions.

Visvanath, your comment/question:

Now my ignorant question: What difference the "Top 100 Universities in the US" would make?

Is interesting but not "ignorant". A perfectly valid and reasonable question. For me, to answer would be, "not a lot", but there is another level here that also needs to be expanded upon. BTW, this is an observation, please do not go reading too much into it anyone, it is not an anti-US rant it is a simple interpretation of observable phenomenon with which no-one has to agree.

We have had a continuous diet of American movies for the last 80 years, and appalling (I think so) television shows for nearly 60 years, in this country. In them, they extoll the virtues of American life, while leaving out a lot of the realities. How many of those movies and television shows have depicted places like Harvard, Yale, MIT, UCLA and so on as being the most desireable academic destinations of aspiring leaders. Let us ignore the non-US institutions of Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, the PolyTechnic, Heidelburg and how many other European institutions, they are not American so therefore are they less worthy? (And in this I am displaying my lack of knowledge of non-European institutes that should make this list as well.) This kind of cultural propoganda has to come out, have an influence, somewhere. The constant promotion of these institutes might make them places students want to go from all over the world, which enhances their prestige, allows them to garnish reputations, but it does not mean they are better run than any other institute, does not mean they are actually achieving better results. (If you concentrate 19,500 people [at Harvard now] into any academic centre and throw a lot of money at them, they will, by virtue of their numbers develop something, anything that will have an impact on the world. In most cases, if you select people properly, or fortuitously, you will not need anywhere near that number.) It is the "desirability" factor that makes these places "leaders" not their achievements.

For these reasons, I suspect, that if the top 100 US institutes were using Moodle, then no commercial product would even get a review anywhere in the world. Even if that is unfair, that is a reality, an observation of how we do things. "If they are doing it, it must be great" is a lazy and usually inappropriate technique for assessing methodologies - but it is what we do.

My opinion is that I listen to Marcus de Sautoy on Maths and a number of others on a range of topics in those television documentaries produced by the Open University (and their connection to Moodle), I suggest that the OU is doing far more for world education, at least, than any of the top 100 US institutes...

And in Australia, I understand that another of our Universities is going over to Moodle right now. All educational levels in this country have connections, in various degrees with Moodle, and now I do not think there are not too many left in the University sector that do not use Moodle. But then, Australian Universities do not rank that highly on attendence "desireability" scales.