Hi,
We are currently evaluating VLE's and are curious to know if any UK HE institutions have employed Moodle as their VLE? If so it would be really helpful if you could name your instituition and maybe provide a link to it.
i've looked on the 'Moodle Sites' but am aware that its not an exhaustive list and some institutions may not have registered their sites.
Thanks in advance.
Hi Farzana
I am lecturer at a New College, Swindon (Further Education, not Higher) and we are just looking at VLEs for ourselves. In looking around, I have found that Cornwall College (also FE) is just changing from WebCT to Moodle - check out URL http://virtual.cornwall.ac.uk
The technical chap in charge is James Barrett and Shirley Crawford is overall in charge of material going on there, I think. You may find these contacts useful.
Cheers
Maggie
Hi again Farzana -
Just found another user of Moodle - Goldsmiths in London - URL https://learn.gold.ac.uk/
Regards
Maggie
Thanks Maggie.
More interested in HE.
Goldsmiths is HE - ULond.
When you do Google search on xxxxx.ac.uk you get a lot of schools and FE as well as HE - ac is academic, it doesn't differentiate.
Most Colleges doing FE do HE as well - HND, First Degrees etc - so you may find we still have some common ground.
Maggie.
One way to find Moodles in use in FE and HE for the UK is by doing the following search on Google:
"Some courses may allow guest access" site:.ac.uk
It's not guaranteed to return every existing Moodle (e.g. they might be hidden from public access, in different languages or not yet indexed by Google) but as you can see there is a wide variety of usage in the sector.
Note that many places, particularly larger institutions, start with Moodle in a single department or faculty before moving to campus wide adoption. This potential for following a low-risk, measured roll-out approach is in fact a key benefit of Open Source, and therefore Moodle, adoption.
That's the model we followed at the University of Glasgow where Moodle was used by my department (GUIDE before being adopted as a centrally supported VLE. The size of our institution and its decentralized nature means we now have many independent yet interconnected Moodles, which you'll see if you follow the Google link given above.
I think it's important for people thinking about moving to Moodle to be public about it, as education organizations seem to have a bit of a herd mentality when it comes to IT adoption, which we may as well take advantage of. Given that Moodle has been in use in the sector for a while now, and is generally well received, combined with Open Source becoming 'respectable', even quite fashionable, in UK education circles in the last 12 months and that many multi-year license deals with proprietary alternatives are coming to an end, I could well imagine a mass-switchover to Moodle occurring. In fact I've already read two articles worrying that a Moodle monopoly would be as bad as a proprietary one. That's not an opinion I agree with, but it at least shows the mindshare that Moodle has.
I noticed that despite the success of Moodle in the University of York's Department of Maths, the university as a whole has chosen to go with Blackboard. Anyone on list know anything about the decision?
David,
The results returned where overwhelming. I didn't expect to find so many HE institutions (or departments/faculties) to have adopted Moodle.
Thank You.
Be aware that the results include many duplicates (e.g. different faculties at Glasgow, and the STACK maths system seems to link from 3 different URLS) but also that it doesn't include every Moodle in UK HE e.g. it doesn't find this site at Strathclyde University:
http://neo.ces.strath.ac.uk/moodle/
That query was designed to avoid false positives, i.e. point to nothing but Moodle sites, even if it missed a few Moodles, but another revealing search query is this:
This search relies on the observation that because of Moodle's catchy branding, many users seem to include that name in the url. Bear in mind that these are not all Moodle sites, though all are web pages that refer to Moodle in some way (JISC user mailing lists etc.) which is interesting data in itself.
The big campus wide adopters in UK HE are Glasgow and Goldsmiths (which someone else linked to above), at least as far as I am aware, but you might also be interested in looking at Dublin City University in Ireland who have some good documentation online about their choice of Moodle.
Hi - I'm from People's College Nottingham. We have created a Moodle site, but we are still in the evaluation period:
There's not a great deal of content to look at - but we have authentication against active directory enabled for students, so they can login as they would on the college network. We are now running the site on linux, and have managed to clone the entire system using the free utility called 'G4U' ('Ghost for Unix'). We have therefore created several backup/ development servers.
Let me know if you have any questions.
John Berry
Hi John,
I've just gotten the go to start a Moodle pilot here at my College. Your course list looks similar to ours and I'm curious about what some of the delivery challenges and solutions you may have come across. I'm interested in finding a group of moodlers in similar situations to share some of our experiences in going online. Your G4U utility, for instance, is a very nice find...
cheers,
dave.
