Lounge

Diane,

I'm involved with using Moodle for a variety of things. I have one site here where a school is using Moodle as its website and as an easy way for teachers to create classroom websites. We are using it here for a college department website and student ePortfolio portal...just started this term, but I think it is going to work out well for us. We are working on developing a joint doctoral program with another university in the state (Eastern Kentucky University and Western Kentucky University). We have a consultant working with us from Alaska and we have set-up a site here to use as a collaboration site for the development work...that site is not open to guests at the moment, but once we get some of our work ready for public view (within a couple of months) we will be opening the site to guests and keeping a closed course for our team work area. I have also set-up a site for another college professor to use in support of what he calls a Saturday Academy for middle school students and parents here.

With the exception of the eportfolio site, I didn't do a lot of code changes. You can be creative in the way you configure the site to make it serve the purpose you want. For example, the first link where the school and teachers basically use it as a website, I set the site to autologin guests and set the courses to be open to guest without a key. We don't allow users to create accounts, but we do create accounts manually for some students if the teacher wants their students to have them.

If you spend some time to get to know the program well, you can do a lot with it by just being creative in the way you configure it. Hope this helps to give you some ideas.

Steve

we use it to create communitys of practice in e-health, i would love to show you but its all confidential data, but yes moodle can do a nice website tool, i think the best exemple is right here moodle.org its using moodle with great sucess and its not for traditional e-learning

We use Moodle for a State level SIS software users group.  www.vasasi.org/moodle
We created a new language type to change words like "courses" to "sections"  Most everything is staight-up Moodle.  We use forums for communications, file folders for software downloads,  Courses for Conference presentations.  Glossaries as FAQ's and as a searchable resources for data queries, and so on.
We do intend to develop more staff development training on the system over time.

To answer your question Diane, at http://www.cabweb.net we are using Moodle for Tutor Community of Practice and Student Collaboration Spaces.  As you will see from the naff interface (unlike others shown here), we only edited the terminology (in configuration) to change courses to spaces and teachers/students to facilitators/participants.

Some Moodlers may be interested to note that we have an online discussion event starting this Friday, facilitated by Jan Visser, entitled "To school or not to school, is that the question?", and another on LAMS in May.

So far, as well as setting up over a dozen Moodles for use in our College for the traditional purpose of online learning, I've set up a Moodle for a collaborative research project on behalf of Lichfield Cathedral, I'm in the process of setting up a Moodle "Intranet" (not strictly intranet, it's actually an internet site with restricted access) for the Cathedral's staff and volunteers, and we're in the early stages of setting up an Intranet for the College staff, again using Moodle.

One of the major advantages of using Moodle as an Intranet is that the Content Providers in each department have direct control of it, and can put stuff directly on their sections of Moodle.  The way we run our Staff Intranet at the moment is that we have an offline version of it, which Content Providers can work on to create their stuff, then when they've got something to make live they have to contact me, then I upload it to the live version.  By using Moodle, however, they'll be able to do it directly, which will bring the principle of what I rather grandly named "Devolved Content Management"  even closer to the Content Providers.

One thing you will have to do is decide on your terminology (ie how you're going to rename Students, Teachers, Courses, etc) and then go through all the language files changing them.  This can be quite a long job, as you'd be surprised how many text strings in Moodle contain those key words!  You may find it easier to load the various language .php files into a text editor and change them directly, rather than use the 'Edit strings' page in Moodle.  If you do that, though, don't change the words inside the [square brackets] - just change the words to the right of the '=' sign.  For example, you might change

$string['students'] = 'Students';

to

$string['students'] = 'Members';

HTH

Chris

I've been setting up Moodle to help our church with communication and other stuff.  There are so many e-mail lists and calendars floating around that we needed a central place to collect them all.  Also, all churches like to track membership, so I created some custom forms that different people can use for reporting.  We also have small groups that meet during the week around the Metroplex, and so we gave each group an "area" (class).  Someday, we are also going to move Sunday School online.  Well, we don't have Sunday School now, but we when we begin it, it will be online.

All of this is hidden behind the "old" site, but here is the link to what is working so far:

http://www.mercyplace.org/mpConnect/