I just wanted to share a faculty response to moodle. One of my colleagues was introducing a faculty member to the moodle way of presenting a course page yesterday. The faculty member literally threw her arms up in the air with excitement -- she almost jumped out of her chair too!
Presenting a course as a sequence of topics or weeks (like how they visualize their course) instead of a collection resources can be a mind-blowing experience to those who have been stuck with a different system for several years.
I am producing a very involved, upper-level capstone course. Now I do it all, I run the course, the server, the hardware--from my house. Over the past 6 years it has resided on WebCT, Blackboard and now Moodle. This course has always been used as an ongoing research project into distance learning and autonomous learning. It must be understood that this course is never advertised as a "distance learning course" in the university catalog. The students learn of this on the first day when we meet in a physical classroom.
In the past, we have had a 50% student drop rate, each semester. This semester our drop rate was under 25%. All content is the same, what we changed was the delivery system (using Moodle now) and we added in the option of attending the 5 live classes either online or in a physical classroom.
The students who have previous experience with WebCT or Blackboard have almost universally accepted the Moodle system as a better way of doing things. The students without prior DL experience comment on how easy and intuitive things are.
As far as setting up Moodle, once I learned how to do it, it now takes me less than 10 minutes to set up a new site, from scratch. I think that is impossible in either WebCT or Blackboard. Comparisons of adding resources to a course can't be compared. Remember, the instructional staff have no desire to be programmers. Click and go.
Is Moodle perfect? Not at all. I find it frustrating and clumsy the way things are displayed at times. But considering that the course has been running 24/7 for 4 months, without a single software related interruption is amazing.
Dave