Hi all
I believe this is a recurring topic. Just read this discussion "MS Sharepoint VS. Moodle" https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=41750 and curious to know the situation a good decade later.
The article "What is SharePoint" https://support.office.com/en-us/article/What-is-SharePoint-97b915e6-651b-43b2-827d-fb25777f446f says, "Organizations use SharePoint to create websites. You can use it as a secure place to store, organize, share, and access information from almost any device. All you need is a web browser, ..." I am interested in the szenario, where the teachers of conventional (state-owned, teachers and pupils arrive in flesh-and-blood in brick-and-mortar classrooms, ...) schools and other institutions in secondary and tertiary education, how they could improve the quality of teaching using either SharePoint of Moodle.
I am familiar with Moodle but not with SharePoint, as such thankful for all your insights, specially from those who know both sides and directly involved in teaching, ideally in similar institutions.
We use SharePoint internally at the Open University (for example for project documentation) so I am forced to use it. Oh my god is it terrible. Pretty much all it is good for is distributing documents. Oobviously Office 365 integration is now quite slick (finally. In Sharpiont 2010 and 2012 it was pretty ropey, at times even if you were using IE).
Sharepoint does have rudimentary wiki, with a HTML editor that is much worse than Moodle's. If you edit even a simple page, with text, headings, and bulleted lists, it can get into a real mess. There have been times when I have had to copy and paste the HTML of a page into my text editor, and use lots of regular expressions to clean it up.
So, if you actually care about teaching online, use Moodle. Hopefully the project to deliver slick office integration in Moodle 3.3 will deliver.
If you just want to distribute documents, Sharepoint might do.
Hi Tim
Thanks for sharing your experience! In fact I have access to a SharePoint. It is so rudimentary I thought I am too dumb to discover its features. Relieved to hear that there is nothing much to discover!
My impression on SharePoint is that it is basically a way of sharing files. So those teachers for whom e-Teaching is distributing files, it might suffice. I said "might" because there is a huge usability problem, at least in our SharePoint. It does not reflect the classes and courses structure we have in Moodle. So depending on how each teacher thinks students have to search for files everywhere!
This problem is not resolved by having a web-based Office Suite.
Now imagine, a teacher wants to collect the solution of an assignment, as files, and grade them. How to do that in SharePoint, considering the functionality of the Assignment activity of Moodle?
That is the tip of the iceberg. How about forum, wiki, glossary and a dozen of other built-in activities? Not to mention the versatility of the on-line testing tool Quiz. We haven't even touched the third-party plug-ins, reporting tools and interfaces, ... goes on and on...
> Sharepoint does have rudimentary wiki, with a HTML editor that is much worse than Moodle's. If you edit even a simple page, with text, headings, and bulleted lists, it can get into a real mess. There have been times when I have had to copy and paste the HTML of a page into my text editor, and use lots of regular expressions to clean it up.
That is a real shock! The editing tool decides between life and death for me! (You guessed it: If Moodle had Vim... ;) )
Thanks for sharing your experience! In fact I have access to a SharePoint. It is so rudimentary I thought I am too dumb to discover its features. Relieved to hear that there is nothing much to discover!
My impression on SharePoint is that it is basically a way of sharing files. So those teachers for whom e-Teaching is distributing files, it might suffice. I said "might" because there is a huge usability problem, at least in our SharePoint. It does not reflect the classes and courses structure we have in Moodle. So depending on how each teacher thinks students have to search for files everywhere!
This problem is not resolved by having a web-based Office Suite.
Now imagine, a teacher wants to collect the solution of an assignment, as files, and grade them. How to do that in SharePoint, considering the functionality of the Assignment activity of Moodle?
That is the tip of the iceberg. How about forum, wiki, glossary and a dozen of other built-in activities? Not to mention the versatility of the on-line testing tool Quiz. We haven't even touched the third-party plug-ins, reporting tools and interfaces, ... goes on and on...
> Sharepoint does have rudimentary wiki, with a HTML editor that is much worse than Moodle's. If you edit even a simple page, with text, headings, and bulleted lists, it can get into a real mess. There have been times when I have had to copy and paste the HTML of a page into my text editor, and use lots of regular expressions to clean it up.
That is a real shock! The editing tool decides between life and death for me! (You guessed it: If Moodle had Vim... ;) )