I have to agree with the comments about the useability dimension. I have become even more allergic to clicks after returning from a 1-year teaching sabbatical (where I actually worked on an open-source project). I know from experience that usability is hard to attain in open source projects, where competent resources are limited.
This semester I am teaching two 35-student groups, each with its Moodle course. After one year away, I'm convinced Moodle's interface to instructors is just too click-heavy, especially when it comes to updating dates for activities and material (slide decks and exercises). I've written my own "hack" that helps with the dates, but so far I haven't found a way to update content easily.
The compromise for me this semester was to use a Google Drive for content, then put a link to it in the Moodle course section for content. However, the extra step to get to the content has really angered a lot of my students (who just want everything to be on Moodle). They spend a lot of time on Moodle passing the quizzes on the material, and having the two things split across platforms is (rightly) a hassle for them.
Starting in January, I have a small graduate class, and I will try it without Moodle and just Google Classroom. I realize Moodle quizzes and assignments have way more functionalities than I will get from doing it in Google Classroom (e.g., Google Quizzes won't give custom feedback for each wrong answer, which I exploit in Moodle quizzes). But, I'm questioning whether those details are worth the lost time and headaches of the whole Moodle experience, or something hybrid that angers my students.
This semester I am teaching two 35-student groups, each with its Moodle course. After one year away, I'm convinced Moodle's interface to instructors is just too click-heavy, especially when it comes to updating dates for activities and material (slide decks and exercises). I've written my own "hack" that helps with the dates, but so far I haven't found a way to update content easily.
The compromise for me this semester was to use a Google Drive for content, then put a link to it in the Moodle course section for content. However, the extra step to get to the content has really angered a lot of my students (who just want everything to be on Moodle). They spend a lot of time on Moodle passing the quizzes on the material, and having the two things split across platforms is (rightly) a hassle for them.
Starting in January, I have a small graduate class, and I will try it without Moodle and just Google Classroom. I realize Moodle quizzes and assignments have way more functionalities than I will get from doing it in Google Classroom (e.g., Google Quizzes won't give custom feedback for each wrong answer, which I exploit in Moodle quizzes). But, I'm questioning whether those details are worth the lost time and headaches of the whole Moodle experience, or something hybrid that angers my students.
Actually I believe it is the (constantly growing) richness of settings in Moodle that is one of the causes of its poor usability (too many knobs to set). Maybe one day there will be a Moodle-Lite version that has only 20% of the features that 80% of most users need. I know there would never be a consensus about what those features are. I believe Google uses usage data to decide what features it deprecates; although I can't say for sure. I am pretty sure they have the data about what is being used.