| Yes, more and more professors in Barcelona and around the world are opting for Moodle and even abandoning the official VLEs in their own university in spite of the fact that by doing so they lose institutional support and technical assistance. Ironically many of these professors are those who are REALLY interested in applying so-called 'new technologies' to improve learning (I'm not talking about myself, I have a number of specific colleagues in mind, both in my university and in other universities). So, most of the time, the ones that stay with whatever the university gives them are the people who are really reluctant to use VLEs and wouldn't even use them if they weren't sort of forced or nudged to do it. So, yes the trend you observe is very possible and maybe the "authorities" will in the end surrender to the evidence and jump on the bandwagon. I think, at least in my university, if eventually there is going to be a VLE "revolution", it will be a grass roots revolution. I don't expect much from our administration, to tell you the truth. The VLE our university has is the house brand and, as you probably know, my university is very brand conscious and totally obsessed with image. Somebody who is not too bright and who is paid loads of money without being held accountable for anything must have come to the stupid conclusion that what brings "prestige" to the university is to have their OWN VLE rather than having one that really works and does what is supposed to do. I don't have the figures, but I'm fairly sure that they could have even bought licenses for a decent proprietary VLE such as WebCT for less money than what they've spent developing and maintaining the pathetic thing we have. But for these "brilliant" minds that are in charge of the administration here, having the name of our university associated with a FOSS VLE must not be "socially" acceptable and might bring a "bad image" (oh, if I could tell you how obsessed they are with image, I have stories you would not believe, maybe in the BCNbeerMoodleMoot  ).
I don't know this for sure, but knowing some of the types that populate
the "high" places of my institution and having lived in the "culture"
of our university for quite a long time, I wouldn't be surprised if
their reasoning went along these lines. I'm not really proud of this
culture but I need to pay my bills . So what I usually do is try to find ways around all the complications that this peculiar culture imposes. Josep M. |
General developer forum
The new floating (and ubiquitous) block is here.
This discussion has been locked so you can no longer reply to it.