Martin - You have administered and used WebCT. Now you have created Moodle. What do you feel the advantages of Moodle vs WebCT? I am sure you have an opinion.
Other opinions are welcome.
Our college uses WebCT. I tried it for teaching one class and went back to creating my own web pages. WebCT got in the way!
Martin - You have administered and used WebCT. Now you have created Moodle. What do you feel the advantages of Moodle vs WebCT? I am sure you have an opinion.
Other opinions are welcome.
Martin - You have administered and used WebCT. Now you have created Moodle. What do you feel the advantages of Moodle vs WebCT? I am sure you have an opinion.
Other opinions are welcome.
I used WebCT for 4 years and gradually switched to Moodle between January and September. Our WebCT licence expired in September - no regrets at all!
Here are some of the reasons for our decision:
Here are some of the reasons for our decision:
- Moodle concentrates on content, not tools. In Moodle, activities of different types can be arranged into topics or weeks, while in WebCT the activities were arranged by tools: All resources here, all discussions there, all quizzes over there. How artificial!
- Flexibility and the customization possibilities (because it's Open Source)
- The vibrant users community
- The level of technical support provided here
- The price
Because its an Open Source project, its very difficult for the application to get in the way. As an example, I just completely changed the navigation presentation of Moodle for my implementation. It took me just over two days; mostly because I wanted to keep it within the standards used so updates wouldn't be difficult. Try doing that with WebCT.
"Out of the box", Moodle is a very easy system to implement and work with. There are a number of interesting modules built and being built that snap in to it fairly easily.
From your description, I'd say that the biggest advantage you'll find is the ability and power to fit the application to your needs, and vice-versa.
mike
As somebody who has used WebCT since version 1.x, I really don't like it that much, it's buggy and overloaded with javascript. WebCT probably has more features (most notably IMS import/export of course data, something I'm working on with regard to moodle), but it all depends what you actually need.
The backend of WebCT which is a horrible mess, with scripts and data intermingled to a frightening degree and it dosn't work off a proper database. (Though the new Vista product does).
I'm hoping to persuade my boss to migrate to something else, which would make my life a lot easier. Moodle looks good and have been impressed so far with the clean and simple design.
> The price
That's one of the reasons for our possible migration, WebCT recently dropped their 'standard version', which basically means that if we want to continue using it we have to stomach a licence fee hike from $5000 to $16,000 to get a fully functional campus edition. The cheaper licences they now offer have some critical functionality (the programmers API) removed.
Out of interest, is there a documented or easy to use API in moodle which I can use to interface external programmes with moodle, with regard to creation of user accounts and adding/removing courses from user accounts
The backend of WebCT which is a horrible mess, with scripts and data intermingled to a frightening degree and it dosn't work off a proper database. (Though the new Vista product does).
I'm hoping to persuade my boss to migrate to something else, which would make my life a lot easier. Moodle looks good and have been impressed so far with the clean and simple design.
> The price
That's one of the reasons for our possible migration, WebCT recently dropped their 'standard version', which basically means that if we want to continue using it we have to stomach a licence fee hike from $5000 to $16,000 to get a fully functional campus edition. The cheaper licences they now offer have some critical functionality (the programmers API) removed.
Out of interest, is there a documented or easy to use API in moodle which I can use to interface external programmes with moodle, with regard to creation of user accounts and adding/removing courses from user accounts
The API you're referring to was one of my priorities for 1.1 but got bumped down by a couple of funded projects like groups and templates. I'm planning an architecture similar to the authentication architecture (ie modular plugins) for enrollments. There will be a Paypal plugin, an external db plugin, etc etc. It's a way off at this point.
The biggest problem that I have encountered when attemping to "pitch" Moodle to my institution is the lack of support for publisher packages. While most of them I have seen are pretty useless, they have a lot of support from professors who like to have their content created for them. Pursuading them to stop using publisher info and start creating their own is the "deal-breaker" at this point.
On a side-note, I used WebCt for almost 4 years and have now escaped its bondage. All of my online and mixed media instruction are now done using Moodle ;)