In light of many schools in the US closing for weeks if not the rest of the school year would it be possible to offer a free moodle for all the schools looking to do distance education. This might be a great way to get moodle back in the graces of 6-12 schools in the US and break the google classroom trend. Any thoughts?
Note: Moodle is free! So is Google not doing anything to help?
I appreciate the request, and I am not the one to speak for others as I am not directly connect with the Moodle organization. But since Moodle still needs a server, perhaps all of these schools could donate some financial support to Moodle showing their support, since schools don't need to spend money to maintain their buildings while closed.
Any instructor can get a free MoodleCloud course.
I appreciate the request, and I am not the one to speak for others as I am not directly connect with the Moodle organization. But since Moodle still needs a server, perhaps all of these schools could donate some financial support to Moodle showing their support, since schools don't need to spend money to maintain their buildings while closed.
Any instructor can get a free MoodleCloud course.
https://support.google.com/a/answer/134628?hl=en
Google doesn't have to do anything to help.
Instructor getting a 'freebie' at MC ... you are proposing an Elementary School teacher become a Moodle admin. And for a school district that had multiple elementary campuses that would also mean support for X number of new admins. One can build it, but doubt they will come ... if they made decision to use GC already - left Moodle some time ago. Could 'team teach', however.
Summer schedule of facilities here in Tx ... a 4 day work week - end of day is pushed to 5 (like the rest of the globe). Facilities closed Friday. Many schools already have automated HVAC systems to control temps - Sat. Sun. so just adding one day. Tx temps in summer 100 degree range. How about Iowa? Kinda doubt that one day 'savings' will cover cost. Besides, it's spring .. not 'dog days of summer'.
Other sources of funds ... transportation ... which is also a rather large budget item but ... bus drivers (which in some schools are hard to find) and any personnel related to transportation need to stay on.
Athletic and Other competitions (academic) ... canceled - but still ... would those savings make up for cost of a Moodle(s)?
Know focus here is on Moodle - the tech ... but rather than putting platform/brand or the tech first, best to look at a solution that's *best* for the community/teachers/students - the people!
There are already companies that provide content stepping up.
Besides all that, there are students who don't have high speed access at home ... nor personal devices that couid handle rich media 100%.
So there is more here than meets the eye.
in spirit of finding a solution ... not in fostering X Y or Z for the sake of tech.
Ken
Yeah well, last I knew Rackspace is about $50 bucks a month for a server plenty powerful enough to run a secondary school on moodles "Latest flavor". I say secondary because it's questionable how well distance education and online media fit into elementary schools. That being said, I guess it makes sense that teachers pour hours into typing question banks into google forms which cannot be exported anywhere versus learning how to run a real LMS which mitigates time spent on mundane tasks and has a direct effect on online pedagogy. I get there is more at play than choosing a platform, how about we put pedagogy first and not stifle those with the "brains" to implement better solutions. Sorry I still think moodle could be implemented and offered in a way that would wipe out those raping school funds in the name of "well this is best for your situation". God forbid you have to hire a human with a brain and "what would happen if they left" fear mentality.
Hi Chad
You wrote:
> I say secondary because it's questionable how well distance education and online media fit into elementary schools.
Plain and simple. Not everybody sees the elephant in the room.
> That being said, I guess it makes sense that teachers pour hours into typing question banks into google forms which cannot be exported anywhere versus learning how to run a real LMS which mitigates time spent on mundane tasks and has a direct effect on online pedagogy.
You crusade against Google is legendary - as documented in I think we failed. Thanks for that, I don't want to imagine a world without idealists!
You wrote:
> I say secondary because it's questionable how well distance education and online media fit into elementary schools.
Plain and simple. Not everybody sees the elephant in the room.
> That being said, I guess it makes sense that teachers pour hours into typing question banks into google forms which cannot be exported anywhere versus learning how to run a real LMS which mitigates time spent on mundane tasks and has a direct effect on online pedagogy.
You crusade against Google is legendary - as documented in I think we failed. Thanks for that, I don't want to imagine a world without idealists!
I see what I experience, I have been fighting for moodle at multiple colleges who choose moodle because it's free than complain because its "clunky" but administered by a student aid or someone who has no clue. All the while they consider paying 130K over 3 years for canvas. But they won't put 10K into their botched moodle install or pay 50k - 80k for someone who can make moodle outperform canvas 100 to 1. what's wrong with people? is it just Americans?
I agree, but in the age where teachers are at best users of tech, I doubt they will be able to install moodle. I just thought as a community we could somehow make moodle easier and seamless. Lets not forget Google Classrrom hardly fits the definition of an LMS.
Moving to Lounge...
Who do you suggest should pay for this generous service?
Who do you suggest should pay for this generous service?
I made a comment about a month ago about online teaching during an epidemic. The general reaction seemed to be it was a Chinese problem. Just as for testing and isolation, the West has wasted six weeks of preparation time. The closing of schools for tens of millions of students is now upon us and as the doors close educators are thinking for the first time how they can teach students.
I am now teaching 300 students according to their normal schedule using webconferencing and Moodle. Every student has a mobile phone and internet access. The first week was the proverbial learning curve with 50 plus on a webconference but there are so many great ways to get students participating in Moodle I am confident my students are still being taught effectively.
I expect to be back in China facing my class within a month as the epidemic has been suppressed by draconian measures. Students in other countries could miss weeks or months of learning.
I don't think the problem is money. Server time is cheap. The problem is lack of planning. The epidemic is cruelly exposing the incompetence in many countries.
Server time may be cheap but it isn't free. For larger Moodle sites it isn't even cheap.
Some institutions just don't have the money.
Some institutions just don't have the money.
A barebones VPS server would cost around $20 a month and could handle a thousand students.
Is there any country which couldn't afford 2 cents per student per month in server time?
The limitation of cost may be in the hand of the student and mobile data costs.
I have no experience in large sites but in another forum a 300 000 student Moodle is being discussed. Applying 2 cents per student gives a monthly amount of US$ 6 000
I you mean the discussion Hardware requirements for 300 k students, it was about squaring the circle.
There have been a few queries with incredible numbers of students. My calculations are if this number of students were in a classroom 5 to 10 000 teachers would be required with a monthly payroll around $10 million alone. Which implies you could spend a small fortune on Moodle consultants and hardware without making much of a dent in it.
Back to the OP. I can't see the increase in online teaching having much effect on Moodle in the short term. It won't be money but because getting a school or district wide Moodle going can't be done overnight. Moodle is serious software and I think many just find it too hard and go for the prechewed corporate spyware. I hope I'm wrong.
My pick for most online learning is Zoom with shared PowerPoints and good luck getting the wee darlings to watch 6 hours of that per day. A slapdash solution to a easily foreseen crisis.
But the OP is talking about K-12 in the US, mind boggling numbers for me. If were to offer development aid, I would choose a developing country. The US has Mrs. DeVoss to take care of their needs!
There have always been queries about Moodle for incredible numbers of people. They rarely, if ever, come to anything.
Probably because they rapidly find out that it's actually both difficult and expensive.
Probably because they rapidly find out that it's actually both difficult and expensive.
I'm sorry, James, but that's quite naive. Certainly in the UK, you can't buy a VPS for the equivalent of $20 a month that would run Moodle at all never mind 1000 students. Then, on top of that, in the real world you need to consider boring things like backups (never cheap). However, yes, small sites can be run for sums that could be described as loose change.
I have a lot of experience of large sites and it just doesn't scale linearly. As sites get bigger the all-round complexity increases dramatically. In short, you need more expensive people to run it. And more of them. When things go wrong (and they will) you need that sort of deep experience across the whole system to fix things. You also have to consider users. How many teachers (or "content creators") does a 300k site have? Who is going to provide support for them? Who is going to provide training for them? I have just hired an e-Learning department of 10-20 people. Want to make an estimate? $50,000+ per month?
I have a lot of experience of large sites and it just doesn't scale linearly. As sites get bigger the all-round complexity increases dramatically. In short, you need more expensive people to run it. And more of them. When things go wrong (and they will) you need that sort of deep experience across the whole system to fix things. You also have to consider users. How many teachers (or "content creators") does a 300k site have? Who is going to provide support for them? Who is going to provide training for them? I have just hired an e-Learning department of 10-20 people. Want to make an estimate? $50,000+ per month?
I think that is what I was trying to say. Hardware is cheap. Experienced professionals are very expensive. It would be interesting to compare the costs of hardware and software to wetware in a Moodle system. The barrier to Moodle adoption is the amount of skill required to deploy and create content. That is why a school will not be loading up Moodle when they are told to close and implement online learning with two days notice.
My experience is that if you are prepared to put in the time to learn, Moodle is incredibly cheap to run. My current site has over 600 users, regularly has more than 50 showing as logged in over the last five minutes and costs way under $20 a month. Backups are automatic and the last three days of course and DB dumps are transfered off site by script to a free Dropbox account. The cost per student is pennies per month. The real cost has been my time.
My experience is that if you are prepared to put in the time to learn, Moodle is incredibly cheap to run. My current site has over 600 users, regularly has more than 50 showing as logged in over the last five minutes and costs way under $20 a month. Backups are automatic and the last three days of course and DB dumps are transfered off site by script to a free Dropbox account. The cost per student is pennies per month. The real cost has been my time.
Re: knowledgeable, skilled, experienced staff, yes, that hits the nail on the head in my experience too. That's one of many reasons why cloud hosting services are so attractive, e.g. https://moodlecloud.com/
I think the same goes for teaching with Moodle: Teachers unaccustomed to working online need (subject specific) training & support. That's more knowledgeable, skilled, experienced staff & so more money.
Perhaps there's something else the Moodle community could be doing to make Moodle more accessible to teachers? In the same way that schools, colleges, & universities can buy course books for specific ages, contexts, curricula, education systems, why can't materials also be available in Moodle course formats, i.e. everything in one Moodle course backup file: syllabus/intended learning outcomes, informational materials, study activities, & formative & summative assessments? Like the students' books & teacher's book all rolled into one. That'd be lowering the barriers to entry substantially.
To make things easier & not re-invent the wheel, there are OER (Open Educational Resources) text books already available, i.e. Creative Commons licensed, at least for high school, higher education, early literacy, & adult literacy, as far as I know. However, they're usually in PDF & Word formats for printing as books. i think it's a matter of converting these course books into Moodle format & developing them into online courses so that teachers who don't have the experience of online curriculum development have an easier first step with learning to teach online. It's easier to learn from example than to try to apply recently, incompletely, & inflexibly learned theories & principles of online learning & teaching.
I suspect that a number of teachers & curriculum developers are already doing this for their schools, colleges, & universities but not sharing them, possibly because much of the courseware includes copyright materials that would be illegal to redistribute. This wouldn't be an issue if they used OERs instead, so they'd be free to share their courses on Moodle.net &/or alongside the PDF/Word versions on OER repositories. Organisations that support & provide OERs are often well-organised & well funded & are often foundations (publicly & privately funded) that have mandates to serve the public good, not turn a profit, not unlike Moodle.org itself (a perfect match?)
As they say in the publishing business, content is king. When you have attractive, high quality content that's convenient & affordable to use (in the case of OER, free), the other issues become more manageable. For an example as an analogy, the software for music/video streaming platforms is pretty much irrelevant to people who like music/movies, as long as it works well enough. People choose whichever streaming service provides the music/movies that they want. Likewise, teachers & institutions want online versions of the curricula & assessments that their students need. They don't have sufficient time, money, knowledge, & skills to "roll their own" elearning any more than they have it for the IT & infrastructure requirements.
What's more attractive still is having both the platform and the content openly licensed & mutually compatible. That goes a long way towards the over-arching ideal of Open Education & reducing barriers to education & training worldwide.
How does that sound for a strategy to get more organisations & teachers to adopt Moodle?
+10
A sound explanation. It was today I said to somebody, "There are three corners to the puzzle: student/pupil, teacher and infrastructure - in that order." didn't expect many to understand it. Next time I will just point to your post.
A sound explanation. It was today I said to somebody, "There are three corners to the puzzle: student/pupil, teacher and infrastructure - in that order." didn't expect many to understand it. Next time I will just point to your post.
To the points you made earlier this year, Matt, our small nonprofit works to support the creation of OER courses that are built in Moodle. We have already released a high school chemistry course, described here. We have parts of 3rd grade science course available and are about to release a Moodle course that provides asynchronous capabilities for the Geogebra versions of Illustrative Mathematics's middle school math curriculum. I will post here when that's ready to go (maybe later this week.)
We plan to post these courses and others as they are ready to go on MoodleNet when it's ready to go.
I completely agree that this is a 'sound for a strategy to get more organisations & teachers to adopt Moodle.'
I agree and am the only teacher I know in the area refusing to use google and doing exactly what you said. But I have been using Moodle in my classes for over 15 years, and flatly
refuse to give it up.
Thanks Chad. The challenge for you and all of us is showing your school that Moodle is superior and produces better outcomes than Google apps. The best way for Moodle to grow is converting teacher by teacher by Moodle enthusiasts.
If we can't do that. we mght as well pack it in.
Another challenge for everyone. Reach out to your fellow teachers and school and offer your services. There are a lot of stessed educators out there wondering what to do. It could be to set up Moodle on a server ready to use, share your own Moodle or mentor a teacher in Moodlecloud. I have already gone from a one to a three teacher Moodle with a new convert and another bought back to the fold after a long absence.
After all, many ot you might have a lot of free time on your hands in the next few months. Stay safe
.
I offer www.openmoodle.org to any educator for free, so im with you.
Chad, you are wrong. All you need now is, guess what, "more Googles"!
California governor says ‘We need more Googles’ as company offers free Wi-Fi and Chromebooks to students
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-google-offers-wi-fi-chromebooks-to-california-students.html
(found in https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/04/01/2359252/california-governor-says-we-need-more-googles-as-company-offers-free-wi-fi-and-chromebooks-to-students )
California governor says ‘We need more Googles’ as company offers free Wi-Fi and Chromebooks to students
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-google-offers-wi-fi-chromebooks-to-california-students.html
(found in https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/04/01/2359252/california-governor-says-we-need-more-googles-as-company-offers-free-wi-fi-and-chromebooks-to-students )
Wait...Moodle is free too! But at a different cost. Moodle costs in human capital, not intellectual hijacking and ad targeting toward 10-year-olds. God only knows what they are planning with the yottabytes of data they are collecting on students.
Let's not forget that Alphabet/Google have spent decades spending $millions on lobbying & gaining access to govt. decision-makers (Google's Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas, was basically a part of the US State Department: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jigsaw_(company) ). They already have national & state admins direct lines & well-established relationships with them. Alphabet/Google also has similar relationships with the press & media corporations (Think of the $billions Google has spent on advertising). They'll get their slick PR messages out to the public before lobbying & arm-twisting their way into getting what they want from our education systems. It's what these large multinational corporations specialise in, i.e. getting govt. contracts, avoiding regulation & oversight, & gaining yet more access to people's data. The real competition is other big IT companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, & Amazon.
What do Moodle PTY &/or Moodle hosting & support service providers have? They're not those kinds of organisations & would be hopelessly out of their depth if they tried. Moodle may be the more effective & efficient service/product for students', teachers', & admins' needs, but that's not what this game is about.
Moodle PTY has worked hard to establish itself as a trustworthy organisation with a huge global community behind it. I doubt there's an educational organisation & community in the world with as much good will & generosity as Moodle's.
Chad has a valid point. Moodle must be setup on server for creating classrooms. Whereas, Google Classroom eliminates this need. So, as community we should highlight Moodle with SaaS services that makes spinning up a DO droplet for example easy and quick for anyone. We have services like Cloudways where Moodle can be setup on a server easily compared to other methods like going to AWS or DO directly.
A scene today reminded me of this discussion. I see, the subject said "US Schools". Just witnessed how the small primary school in the neighbourhood solved the problem. The teacher makes a round with a deck of file covers, drops them in to the mail box of the kids and collects the previous one. That on foot! Those files contain homework, the neighbours told me. The seven year old boy apparently couldn't wait to show his maths work to the teacher.
So, that is a Swiss original solution. Or, is it?
So, that is a Swiss original solution. Or, is it?
We just had a discussion in another thread... Moodle HQ has rejigged the moodle web site somewhat to steer schools towards the (mostly free) Moodle Cloud provision. Apparently schools are falling over themselves to take this up. So, there you are, it's happening and at a cost to Moodle HQ.
They have money, it's ok to charge! Look at the expense savings to districts over COVID19 across the US: transportation, lunches, subs, electricity, heat, water, all significantly less now that they are closed. Also Devos authorized on 4/06 schools to reallocate title I funding and other funding to prioritize delivering classes online. DOnt let them shit you, they have lots and lots of money.
Yep, successfully: - MoodleCloud & unprecedented demand from COVID-19: Impacts and next steps https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=398936
Die Verbreitung von Moodle ist ein Glücksfall während der Corona-Pandemie. (German) https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=399873
https://moodle.com/news/registered-moodle-sites-jump-by-30-percent-in-just-one-week/?utm_medium=organicsocial&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=Moodle%20sites%20worldwide (found in Info Update https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=399050 )
Lernraum Berlin Zahlen vom 20.04.2020 (German) https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=398606#p1618878
I might as well respond to myself. Moodle should target the State Department of Educations in the US for profit. Google classroom is a joke, not even close to being able to be a stand-alone distance education platform. Now faced with COVID19 states and districts are realizing they will need a platform that can mirror the face to face environment. They are forecasting phasing schools back and many shutting down if an outbreak happens. If Moodle fails to tap this market, companies like www.K12.com who have it about 80% right will not only bury moodle in the secondary arena but probably decimate public schools with them. Moodle can empower the Instructor and hold them accountable to create quality content, while corporate versions will script the education moodle the UI of moodle and sell it to communities, districts, and states for PPE (Per Pupil Expenditure) which in some states is as high as 12 thousand dollars a year per student. It's ok to look from the code once in a while and ponder the pedagogical impact you could have on the world with this brilliant platform! Teachers teach kids, not computers or corporations!
Chat Parmentier wrote:
> Moodle should target the State Department of Educations in the US for profit.
Just a minute. Where are we? Moodle is made in a different continent. I work in a different continent. Why should we work for the US. Is this the neo-imperialism?
> Google classroom is a joke,
So what? Where I work, central Europe, Google Classroom is virtually non-existant. It is Microsoft who dominates.
> If Moodle fails to tap this market,
May be you mean Moodle HQ and the Moodle Partners? That is up to them. We are in the community moodle.org.
> companies like www.K12.com who have it about 80% right will not only bury moodle in the secondary arena but probably decimate public schools with them.
Where? In the US? I am not least worried. Your Mrs. DeVoss is eating it alive anyway.
(The rest I understand even less.)
> Moodle should target the State Department of Educations in the US for profit.
Just a minute. Where are we? Moodle is made in a different continent. I work in a different continent. Why should we work for the US. Is this the neo-imperialism?
> Google classroom is a joke,
So what? Where I work, central Europe, Google Classroom is virtually non-existant. It is Microsoft who dominates.
> If Moodle fails to tap this market,
May be you mean Moodle HQ and the Moodle Partners? That is up to them. We are in the community moodle.org.
> companies like www.K12.com who have it about 80% right will not only bury moodle in the secondary arena but probably decimate public schools with them.
Where? In the US? I am not least worried. Your Mrs. DeVoss is eating it alive anyway.
(The rest I understand even less.)
If the government can provide support on moodle then blended learning won't be a problem anymore.