I would just like to add my bit about SharePoint Vs Moodle. I am an IT manager and I have experience in setting up Moodle in a previous post. When I started at my new post they were also running moodle. The problem with Moodle is that its just too complicated to do the simple things like adding links / files etc, so much that absolutely nobody bothered to use it.. I know there are people that will say no its not complicated but in my honest opinion yes it is too fiddly..
So I set up SharePoint 2010 at my school and yes it was quite tricky to set it up initially and configuring it properly is very tough, I have spent hours on forums to get it up and running properly.
But I have to say that it was worth it, I have had a surge in content being added by students and teachers who were simply afraid of moodle.. They add links add assignments (Yes you can have assignments in sharepoint using Sharepoint learning kit) You can even add scorm packages! The only thing it lacks as standard is reporting functionality on the assignments but this isn't really an issue at my school anyway.
The beauty of Sharepoint is that you can easily set up document areas and share them due to the ease of assigning very fine tuned permissions on just about everything, it makes things so easy to manage.
Not to mention the Google style sharepoint search system which is absolutely brilliant!
I'm not a moodle hater and I have experience in setting it up and using it but my opinon is that SharePoint is actually better due to it being a lot easier for novices to add content. The thing is from my experience and from visiting quite a number of schools (Most use Moodle) is that most of the schools I have seen don't really use the full functionality of moodle , for example all the reporting features blah blah.. From my observations, all they really want to use it for is for sharing files and adding links! That's pretty much it.. Oh and perhaps the odd Scorm package which is quite rare these days thanks to the cloud hosting most applications..
I have spent many hours trying to teach users to add content to moodle but a week later virtually nobody went near it because they had forgotten how to do it. With SharePoint I only needed to show them once and they are all adding content with ease!
In some ways though its a bit unfair to compare SharePoint to Moodle because Moodle is far more established in the educational environment but the problem is that Microsoft have that power to edge into anything they want due to their power in the computing world.
And because it's a school Sharepoint doesn't cost hardly anything! It cost me around 350 quid for a licence under my school agreement which is to be honest completely peanuts!
As far as setting it up is concerned I can understand why most schools stick with Moodle because sharepoint is a beast to set up properly! It was a real headache but I can say was definetly worth the time spent trauling through the event viewer fixing all the errors thrown up during the setup phase. To be fair though I think Microsoft offer SharePoint free on their 365 cloud so you don't even have to worry about setting it all up now..
Long live Moodle and Long live SharePoint! Different beasts completely but both very good in their own right.
