Let's Get Ready to Moodle - Steve Corich

Let's Get Ready to Moodle - Steve Corich

by David Scotson -
Number of replies: 1

An interesting piece examing the potential switch to Moodle of a New Zealand IT lecturer. It's a fairly nuanced piece, so I'd suggest reading it all as a skim read may leave you with the wrong impression:

Let's Get Ready to Moodle

Steve Corich

Abstract

The growth of elearning has been described as explosive, unprecedented, and above all, disruptive. The e-learning movement is gaining momentum and for teachers of Information Technology and Management pressure to get courses online is increasing. The majority of early e-learning adopters in New Zealand decided to adopt mature learning management systems (LMS) like Blackboard and WebCT. More recently a number of tertiary institutions have been looking to the open source community to provide a less expensive and hopefully equally functional e-learning support system. Internationally, and particularly within New Zealand, there are a growing number of institutions looking towards Moodle, an open source LMS built using PHP and MySQL.

This paper investigates Moodle from the viewpoint of an IT lecturer who has published courses on Blackboard for several years and who is facing the distinct possibility of having to migrate to Moodle in the near future. The paper compares the functionality of the two systems and examines issues such as materials migration, assessment, collaboration tools and activity reporting.

Read the full article in the Bulletin of Applied Computing and Information Technology

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In reply to David Scotson

Re: Let's Get Ready to Moodle - Steve Corich

by Art Lader -
This, I like!

During the evaluation, the writer moved from being a skeptic, who believed that Moodle adoption would be an unwise move, to an enthusiastic supporter of Moodle, despite its relative immaturity as a product. The way that Moodle encourages instructors to organize materials sequentially and the tools that Moodle offers instructors and students to encourage regular student participation in course activities, make it an attractive proposition as an institutional solution for supporting e-learning. The claims that Moodle was developed from the ground up with the principles of social constructivism in mind seem to be justified. The writer was so impressed with the Moodle approach that he has decided to stop developing the LMS that he has been using successfully in an intranet environment and move to Moodle.

-- Art