Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
- there is such a strong groundswell of opinion in favour of Moodle that Becta will have to accept it
- large authority groupings (like CLEO) have chosen Moodle as the VLE that they will support
- the Moodle community will "tweak" Moodle until it fits into the specification
- BECTA are only an advisory body - they cannot force schools down a particular route
David Berry
With regard to SIMS DATA people might find this interesting in relation to MIS:
http://www.l4l.org.uk/content/view/116/1/
Leon Cych
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
I have an early draft of the Becta framework for the requirements for Learning Platforms which goes back to March 2006. Using this document Moodle meets every mandatory requirement and all of the recommended requirements (there is a question over one aspect - the submission of coursework to the examination board in an agreed format - but what does this mean? If it means that the VLE stores the coursework in an agreed format such as Word etc. then this is not a problem, but if it means as an internal e-portfolio then this could be a problem). Personally I think that it meets the requirements set, but I would like to see a final version of the requirements. The commercial companies are arguing for interoperability between their MIS and VLE, the importance of parent spaces and the benefits of offline use. We have solved the parent problem with our Moodle site and we have extracted data from SIMS for use in Moodle. Personally, I feel that offline has as many, if different, issues for schools to consider. If I can find anything more recent I will let you know, but I am sure that someone else may have more up-to-date information.
Hope this is useful
Andy Wilson
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
This "getting data out of SIMS" thing is a big question for a lot of UK schools that I have talked to. I'd be interested to hear how people are doing it.
Re: BECTA, we actually applied to BECTA (in conjunction with the Open Learning Partnership) to have Moodle included in the approved learning platforms list. Filling in all of their forms and jumping through all the hoops. This was after *they* approached *us*. We never even got an acknowledgement, and I see that the recently announced list has only proprietary commercial products on it. Which was a big surprise. Not.
Sean K
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
) and asked him why BECTA had a negative view of open source. I think his view can be summed up as:- OSS communities have pushed forward innovation in elearning and are valuble as such.
- However OSS needs specialist support teams and those people are difficult to retain.
- There isn't a lot of use of OSS in commercial arenas so that shows its problems.
):2: Not true, e.g. I can install Moodle 1.6 on a USB stick and I'm an idiot when it comes to Admin tasks. I've run both Moodle and BB and the former is easier for users, teachers and admins.
3: Erm, what about Google inc using Linux?
His view compares interestingly to this advice document which predates him starting as CEO at BECTA and says that upkeep of OSS compared with commercial software is 'neutral' leading to significant savings overall because of the licence fee saved.
To be fair to him, I was quite pushy, he'd just flown back across 9 time zones to make it to the meeting and he politely thanked me for the discussion. However, I don't consider his views very enlightened given BECTAs mission.
Rich
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
BECTA have provisionally agreed to answer specific questions on this in a podcast but have been a little slow in getting back to me because of their change of remit.
Rest assured all these questions and more will be asked.
The problem really is the European Union in this case because the "standards" applied are to do with a cap on business offered to the public sector at a certain amount.
Because BECTA's remit has changed it will be interesting to monitor their relationship with the commercial sector. For what it is worth my gut feeling, based on several anecdotal conversations with individuals around the country, is that certain done deals are in position (and for legal reasons I could well be wrong - but it does seem a lot of CPD materials are already been written in anticipation and there is a lot of money in there if LEAS buy in en masse;)) but that Moodle will be used anyway in the pedagogical bits because it is easy to set up and maintain (maybe not maintain the security of data...). But don't forget, in many cases schools make their own purchasing decisions. Sure there will be pressure from certain LEAS to buy a certain product if there is a historical relationship but people need to ask themselves, is it extensible, open and interoperable? I do like to see certain headteachers' faces when I say well it's your job on the line if you buy in built in obsolescence and proprietary systems no-one is going to use...what is your job worth then and there are few enough heads out there as it is!
That is why I would welcome information from anyone using Moodle in UK schools so I can highlight it to the advisory community as exemplars of good practice.
Those of you belonging to NAACE may have seen this http://www.online-conference.net/vle2006/introduction.htm which mentions that 'This conference is the natural successor to the one we organised in association with Becta, in 2004, "VLEs: beyond the fringes and into the mainstream" (sorry if it's already been mentioned elsewhere). I notice that Martin is doing a keynote and there are plenty of references to Moodle and Open Source in the presentations so I'm sure it will prompt discussions about the DfES requirements.
R39: AV Conferencing
R41: Email
R43: Messaging
R8: Coursework
My own thoughts on the list are at http://elgg.net/mberry/weblog/23355.html , and there's a far more penetrating critique at http://aocnilta.co.uk/2006/09/13/learningplatform/ (do I detect the hand of our own Josie Fraser here?)
The technical specification is another matter, as there are some interesting choices here, like Atom instead of RSS for syndication, but I wouldn't worry.
The approved list is not going to be of VLEs as such, but of (big) companies able to provide a managed solution, including a VLE component. There's nothing to stop these companies using Moodle as their provided VLE, and of course it makes good sense commercially for them to provide the World's Favourite VLE rather than re-invent the wheel or pay licence fees for another. We can but hope that some of their revenue stream makes it back to Moodle HQ.
As Leon says, the final decision rests with the schools - there is some virtue in pooling resources and sharing content at LA level, but, I'd argue, even more in participating in a world-wide and cross-phase user and developer community here.
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
In answer to point 3, you might find this a useful survey http://www.ncc.co.uk/aboutncc/press_rel/open_source_survey_results.cfm.
Incidentally, Atos Origin are using OSS for the Olympics I believe.
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
Nice point, thanks for that.
Rich
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
Dear Chris and Sean,
Moodle and SIMs - We have just started working on this over the Summer. I
have a small team of proficient technicians who are all Moodle devotees.
We wanted to prove the process this Summer in order to think carefully about
what we might gain from SIMs. The first objective was to extract basic
information from SIMs. We tried to extract data from SIMs in
order to automatically generate a course for every member of staff in the
school for each year group taught in 2006-7 in each subject. By running
a report from SIMs and using a little piece of scripting this was
achieved. Secondly we have
added the functionality of enrolling the correct students to those courses as part of the process.
There is a logistical issue for rollover. Some teachers will need their
courses to rollover to the next year and some won't. The script we have
used will allow us to add the extra courses that will be required at the
beginning of Year 2007-8 withough jeopardising the current courses. However, manual rollover of courses will be required next Summer. We have also added a Parent login which used data from SIMs to create a login for every parent. Essentially the parents login as their son/daughter and can therefore see everything that they can see. However, they use a different username and password to ensure that student change of password does not affect the parent login. We have not distributed the parent login as yet, but again it can be found on our current Moodle site.
I hope that this is useful, we were going to offer out some advice on this once we were sure of the process and happy that it would work in other school environments. If anyone else is working towards the same goals I would be interested to know.
Andy
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
Re: Does Moodle meet all the UK DfES requirements for a VLE?
Thanks for this, but we can't use LDAP. Our Moodle sits outside the LEA system (this is a long story), but we still authenticate against their database for e-mail username and password. We use imap to complete this process.
Andy