How many man hours does it take to take the moodle out of the box package and program it into a MOOC solution?

How many man hours does it take to take the moodle out of the box package and program it into a MOOC solution?

by Anne Deng -
Number of replies: 4

I am new to this, but we are going through the initial planning phase of creating a MOOC application using MOODLE's open source package. We are thinking of including the following features: 

video uploads, students authentication, course dashboard, chats, social network connection, file sharing, security, assignments, grading and payment. 

And I would like to have both the web and app version of this application. 

Would anyone who has experience in developing such an application (or similar) provide any insight on the amount of effort it would take? (money and manhours) - for budgeting purposes. Much appreciated!

Thanks,

Anne

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In reply to Anne Deng

Re: How many man hours does it take to take the moodle out of the box package and program it into a MOOC solution?

by Andy Chaplin -

Hi Anne,

I think the (unfortunate) answer to your question is "how long is a piece of string?"

There really are too many variables - the knowledge and experience of your team, and the size and complexity of your proposed MOOC - to make any meaningful suggestions.

Something that may help you is a MOOC that's running at the moment here:  https://www.canvas.net/browse/itsligo/courses/moocs-on-a-budget  which covers many of the things you are asking.  You can still sign up, and if you're serious about setting something up you would quickly get up to pace there.

If when you're done there you have some specific questions on individual issues, I'm sure there are many people who will be able to help you.

Hope this helps,


Andy

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In reply to Anne Deng

Re: How many man hours does it take to take the moodle out of the box package and program it into a MOOC solution?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

 I can install Moodle in 10 minutes.

However, the planning, hardware configuration, software installation, software configuration and testing for a big load-balanced implementation might easily take weeks of hard work. And that's before you've even thought about content (I'm not a content person). 

So, yes, *it depends*. 

You need to tell us where you are starting from and where you hope to end up. What skills and experience do you have, how will you implement Moodle and how big an installation will it be. 

If (as I guess might be the case) you don't know the answer to this stuff then I *strongly* encourage you to get some experience with Moodle on something small and non-critical. Especially as there's a few things in your list that are tricky (e.g. video, payment, 'security' - what does that mean?) You will thank me later wink

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In reply to Anne Deng

Re: How many man hours does it take to take the moodle out of the box package and program it into a MOOC solution?

by Rick Jerz -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Why not contact a Moodle partner for you needs.  If you get a quote, you can then consider if it would be worthwhile doing everything on your own.

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In reply to Anne Deng

Re: How many man hours does it take to take the moodle out of the box package and program it into a MOOC solution?

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

I advise you to get a free Moodle account at MoodleCloud and experiment with what you get "out of the box", then try to work out the details of what you really want from that list of features you mentioned. 

For example, out of the box Moodle comes with a system for payment.  However the chance that matches exactly with what you want is slim. Moodle is designed first and last for students to learn and teachers to teach, so the default payment system is Paypal. You can do other payment systems with a finer grain of control, but in the end paying for stuff is not core to teaching and learning.  

By the way, anything to do with online video is complex so assume you will farm that out to specialists.

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