Comparisons and advocacy

Hi Darren, from looking over Maps, it seems kind of an apples vs. oranges comparison. It looks more like Maps is more of an eportfolio system than a course management system. It looks to have great features for assessing written assignments or hand graded assignments over time, between student and teacher, but nothing like the automatically graded quizzes, branching lessons, interactive glossaries, or collaborative forums that Moodle has.

Maps really looks more like an online system to manage the work of grading written assignments in a traditional (face to face) class, not a full featured tool for running online or hybrid courses or entire educational institutes. There seems  no reason that the two should need to compete, I would think one could run a course in Moodle and use Maps as a portfolio system in a nice conjunction (the main issue being that Moodle assignments wouldn't directly tie in to Maps, though perhaps that could be managed).

With the 'send commented paper back to student' features in some folks are adding to the assignment module, along with the MyFiles block we are working on, one could approximate some of the features of Maps withMoodle, I guess, however IMO, Moodle is more of a course management system while Maps is more of an individual management system, and they don't really compete directly.

An open source equivalent to Maps seems to me like it would be Segue rather than Moodle.