Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Brian Maynes -
Number of replies: 17

My organization (private company of ~1700 employees across the US) has been looking very closely at Moodle for our in-house LMS. We currently have no such system in place, but like the idea of 'owning' the LMS, rather than outsourcing to some online solution provider. I wanted to get feedback from similarly sized companies who have successfully implemented Moodle (and even those who may have not been so successful) to get a better idea of the viability of such a system in our company.

It is clear that from a feature/function perspective, Moodle has everything we could ever need from an LMS. That actually may be the problem...flexibility breeding complexity, which we may not be prepared to support. We are wondering if Moodle might be too much for us due to required IT and development resources. Essentially, we want to be able to do basic student/course enrollment, provide online course materials in a variety of formats, and be able to track student activity in the LMS.

I'm curious to hear about your experiences implementing and/or administering Moodle. What are some potential pitfalls to be aware of (IT, softdev, etc)? What challenges did you have to overcome?

Kind Regards,

Brian...Denver, CO

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In reply to Brian Maynes

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Michael Penney -

Hi Brian, you can disable the modules and blocks you don't want to use in the Administration menu, so you could 'pare it down' to just the esstentials.

We worked on a minimalist install here (lesson, quiz, and glossary), for instance:

http://wcln.org/cms (click the login as guest button).

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In reply to Brian Maynes

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Will Taylor -
Not quite your scope, but I run a site for a postgraduate school of ~600 students, staff & faculty, with course support for ~130 courses/term plus "course" pages for committees, support offices, &c.  Do it all single-handed, with 4 work-study "moodle assistants" (moodlers) to support non-cyber-savvy faculty members and provide quality assurance, enforce best practices in page design &c.

I think you'll be impressed with the direct simplicity of this platform, & its ease of implementation.
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In reply to Will Taylor

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Robert Trim -
I wish I could say our implementation has been at least 50% good. Biggest hurtle is documentation. It is tough to just find one place to say, find  how to email everyone in the class. I was told to do it through the forum but no one get the email. So now I spend a lot of time trouble shooting.

There is a 'Moodle way' of doing things which isn't always what I would consider a 'normal' (what ever that is) path. Some software you can just figure it out. Not so in Moodle. What you need is off in a corner somewhere....like trying to delete a student from the course. This is an artifact of community developed software and maybe PHP coding limits.

I'm currently testing for our college which is WebCT specific. The jury is still out.

bob
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In reply to Robert Trim

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Will Taylor -
You usin' the same MOODLE I am ???
I have really had very little difficulty getting several sites up & going smoothly - & any problem I did have was answered within 48 hrs (usually 20 minutes) in these forums.
There are always the non-Moodle issues - like students not getting their email confirmations of registration or email from subscribed forums because their SPAM filters were set to reject & they didn't even know they had a SPAM filter so didn't think to look in the trash; that kind of thing.  But the platform itself, I've found elegant & straightforward to use.
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In reply to Will Taylor

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Tony Ruggiero -
AMEN!!!

I have set up and maintain 5 separate Moodle installations for two different schools and not had many problems at all.

Usually it's something I forgot to do if there is a problem.

My clients seem to be very happy with it.

Tony
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In reply to Robert Trim

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Thomas Haynes -

Wow...

I am blown away by the "tough to figure out" comment. We have done a demo for lots of things here in the TechEd group. We are teachers from each of the academic areas, and we cover a lot of territory in terms of technical skill.

As a group we found Moodle amazingly easy to use, and this was compared to other things we used in a trial environment.

We have had problems from time to time. The move from 1.4 to 1.5 changed the way we assigned grades, and it required more clicks. We were not the only ones unhappy with the interface, and soon enough there was a gradebook module to give us an easier, quicker way to enter grades.

We have 1,000 users or so, and the server sees a lot of traffic. I am a fulltime math teacher, and I support the server and the technical end of things. We have a dedicated instructional tech person who supports the classroom end of things (although I do some of that too). The server runs Linux and was bought for $500 off Ebay.

The return on investment is pretty high because we have so little invested and seen so much benefit. 

Good luck with the test. We have really been happy with Moodle. 

Regards...   Tom  

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In reply to Thomas Haynes

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Robert Trim -
Tough to figure out 101.
How to delete a student from a course.
1- go to forum, use advanced search for 'delete student'. There will be zero posting amongst the 1000's that will tell you how to delete a student from the course.
2- go to teachers manual for Moodle. Only tells you how to unenroll a student. Not what I needed. The students original registration to the course got corrupted so they needed to be totally deleted in order for them to re-attempt a new registration.
3- spend 3 hrs. clicking through every possible nook and cranny of the program. Find the Participants link in the People block. After getting over the frustration that the main listing has no order to the names, no help button to give a guy a break, and no reference to the operation of this screen in the Moodle manual, you figure out that the list headers are, in fact, sort engines. Cool.  Then you find out that you can click on a list name and bring up their profile. Cool. THEN, low and behold, at the bottom of the screen is the magic unenroll button. Wait... no delete student file?
4- write note to Moodle forum indicating that "my mileage did vary" when it came to ease of use and why.
5- response is "I am blown away by the "tough to figure out" comment."

So, I still don't know how to delete a student from a course or even if it is possible. I think I have been dissed by someone who could have helped, maybe. And as a 3 week old user of Moodle, you wonder why I might be frustrated. This is already to long for me even to go into the gap between asking the question "how do I enter a grade into Moodle?" and actually finding the way to do it. It's not a short connective leap to the answer if you read the user manual.

Sorry for the rant. Note to self... be very careful about posts here.

bob
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In reply to Robert Trim

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Will Taylor -
Robert -
Sounds like you want to delete a user's entire account, not merely remove their enrolment in an individual course?

Go to the main page.
In the Administration block, click on Users.
Click on Edit user accounts.
Find the user in question, and click on Delete way over to the right.

If this is not what you want to do, please write back & I or another of this wonderful group of folks will be happy to help out.

Sorry if you felt "dissed". Not intended. On my part, I was puzzled that this beloved LMS was perceived to be a boggle - it has been very kind to me.

& next time, feel free to send your query before the 3hrs of clicking here & there!  blush   My experience is that a helpful response from this community will usually be found in less than 3 hours!

- will


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In reply to Robert Trim

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Thomas Haynes -
Bob...

For what it is worth, I pull the user names out of Active Directory and add them all with a text file. If you have admin rights to the moodle install, you probably have an administration block on the main  page when you log in. You can manage users there. You have a link to upload users or to edit user accounts. In the edit user accounts, you can search for a user and delete/whatever.

We don't do the self register because there are too many variables, and we lock fields for the folks we import so they can't change a username to "Bill Clinton" just for laughs. The AD users all have email accounts in the system, and they accept emails from Moodle. We have authentication handled by the pop3 server that provides email. This way I don't mess with passwords. If the email account gets a new password or it gets disabled by the mail admin, it is all taken care of.

If you want to delete a student from a course, go to the course. If you are a teacher for the course, you can click on the "students" in the course administration block and add or delete from folks who are registered. 

This all seems pretty intuitive to me, but I have used/installed a lot of different programs on the linux server and maybe I am not the best judge.

Don't think you have been dissed (by me anyway). I think you will find that it all works. There is a learning curve, and it will all seem second nature soon enough. I have found Moodle to be remarkably easy to use, and I suspect it will all make sense for you as well if you give it a chance.

It has been a long week with new classes and teachers coming on board who are wanting help setting up gradebooks. We are in the middle of teacher evals and level self-evals, etc. I posted my previous response while taking a break from setting up a spreadsheet of benchmark scores for my level with item analysis.

Regards...   Tom
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In reply to Robert Trim

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Michael Penney -

If your forums aren't emailing, you probably haven't finished the install process. There should be a button in your Administration control panel telling you your cron has not been run, and you can push it to go back to the step in the install process where you set up the automatic emailing and other automated processes.

This is an artifact of community developed software

Hmm, I've used a number of very expensive software products where important things were hidden and poorly documented, an LMS is a pretty big, complicated product that it may take some work to figure out (I'm still finding things out about Blackboard after 4 years or sosmile). We found WebCT a total mess in ver. 3 and never went back, perhaps it has improved dramatically in vers. 4 (though it still seems it takes professional training to administer it).

You may find our Moodle quickstart guide and faculty guide of some help:

http://learn.humboldt.edu/mod/resource/view.php?inpopup=true&id=12468
http://learn.humboldt.edu/mod/book/view.php?id=8730

Setting up cron:
http://moodle.org/doc/?file=install.html#cron

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Robert Trim -
I have zero, nada, zip, "you can't touch that", control of any admin. functions. The person admin'ing it got it loaded on a way underpowered machine and said to me "have fun... we'll support you."  So I scratched together a class, brought it on line in 4 days and wing it in what little spare time I have.

The other problem we have no solution for is the user registration glitch. The new student does NOT get a confirming email. Don't know why and the admin. guy is busy on other fires. Wish I could help him but would not know where to start without being the middle man in a long distance phone conversation.

Thanks for the links. I'll use them.

bob
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In reply to Robert Trim

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Will Taylor -
Robert,
sounds like you are doing pretty well with very little support.
LIkely a good idea to move to a server with administrator who can really support your efforts.  Find a unix server with admin who understands how to set up CLAM AV for you (to screen uploaded Word files for viruses, to protect users downloading these files) and how to set up the cron jobs (or use an external cron service).  Mostly somebody who gives you some return for the $$ you pay them.  You deserve some respect ;^).
If no confirming emails - the problem is likely not w/in Moodle itself.  Emailing configuration of server, or no cron job, or users' spam filters trashing the mails sent out are the 3 most likely scenarios.
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In reply to Will Taylor

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by David Andrew -
The other possibility re the emails is that your server does not allow email forwarding - if this is the case then not only does it cause problems with email as such but other things - I had a problem with a similar tool where if someone reported they had lost their password the system changed their password and sent them an email with the new one - except of course it didn't, and there was no error message.

I totally agree with paying for a professional service - the above story comes from me trying to use my university server - moodle is installed on a commercial ISP I pay for.
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In reply to Brian Maynes

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Nick Stephenson -
Hi Brian,

I have been involved with quite a few Moodle implementations in the business sector. I agree that Moodle has many features that are superfluous to corporate training needs and these features can also be a little distracting during the scoping/ setup phase.

Moodle handles content delivery very well and the tracking/ grading features (with a bit of creative configuration) are sufficient. Probably the one weakness I see at present is the lack of reporting features at the organization level. Also it could do with a few other features to help with ‘pushing’ learning to employees.

That being said, the great thing about OS is that if something doesn’t work the way you want it to, you can customize it to suit your needs, usually cheaply.

I think one of the key benefits of Moodle is how easily subject matter experts can create content and manage students. Getting training out quickly to employees (LMS marketing guys call this rapid elearning) can be a bit of a headache with many other but with Moodle it is very straight forward.

In regards to pitfalls I can’t really note any significant ones I have experienced. Every LMS implementation that I have seen fail has been a result of poor learning content. Companies often say lets get an LMS to save us money on training with little consideration about how/ who will create the content. The LMS side of things is the easy part.

Hope this helps.



Cheers

Nick
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In reply to Brian Maynes

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Worth Bishop -

Hi Brian -

Here's a suggestion - rather than listen to us, most of whom have developed a positive bias through experience, why not try the skunkworks approach? Put up a Moodle site and experiment in your own environment a bit.

It may require the investment of a little time to get Moodle running - measured really in hours, maybe a day or two if you're inexperienced, but certainly not weeks. For a demo site you don't need a lot of horsepower, and in a company with ~1,700 employees I'm willing to bet you've got space on a web server somewhere that could handle it without breaking a sweat.

If you've got courseware already developed, it shouldn't take long to put it up on Moodle (if it's SCORM compliant, it should be _very_ simple.) Then put a couple of learners through the course. See what they think.

If you've got IT issues - i.e., a strictly controlled environment where firewall concerns, resource allocation, support anxiety, cost allocation, etc. make getting a site up a hassle, I'll bet there are people here in the community - "official" partners and others as well - who'd put up a site for you to experiment with at little cost.

If, after some hands-on time with Moodle, you decide it's not what you need - well, you haven't lost much and you've gained a great deal:  case-specific knowledge.

This is the approach we used a couple of years ago and we've never looked back.

Good luck.

WB

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In reply to Worth Bishop

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Brian Maynes -

Thanks everyone for the great feedback!

Nick and WB...that was exactly the info I was looking for...much appreciated.

As far as reporting is concerned (and this is BIG for us), I am already accepting the fact that we will need to add some tables to MySQL to support our org structure. We should then be able to tie all student (user) records to this data for more accurate and useful reporting using custom Crystal Reports, etc.

Is there any reason why something like this can't be done? Anyone done it?

Thanks again...Brian

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In reply to Brian Maynes

Re: Moodle implementation challenges...your experiences?

by Worth Bishop -

Should be ok.  We've added fields to tables (using PostgreSQL) but not tables.

Give it a shot & let us know what you learn!

WB

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