Hi to you all,
I was really chuffed to happen on this project yesterday, it looks like you have a giant beating product in moodle and a great community behind it. Well done! I look forward to watching you eat into the WebCT/Blackboard market.
I have been working in University e-learning for a while now and I have a bee in my bonnet about elearning platforms: They seem to be developed more for features than for usability and robustness and this is to the disadvantage of the learner: IMHO there is nothing worse than getting stuck because of a major bug as a student and nothing less inspiring than an unecessary feature ('click here to highlight all students on this bulletin board with red hair').
Moodle seems naturally aimed at producing good usability and robustness - it certainly looks uncluttered and intuiative, and reading these forums it seems bugs and problems are dealt with rapidly. IMHO the UKeU platform (www.UKeU.com) I am going to be working with in the near future (as far as I've got to know it) fails on these counts so more power to your elbow!
However, I think the discussion thread on simplicity (by Ray, Martin and others) was very interesting to read. I agree with Ray that there is a danger in developing Moodle features to a point where the usability suffers and that this issue is one to watch as moodle develops.
Unfortunatley I haven't got a choice in which platform to use in my new job but I hope to be able to roll out moodle 'in anger' so to speak in the near future. In the mean time I'm going to get a techie friend of mine to install moodle somewhere and I shall enjoy messing about with it!
Cheers
Richard