I've just today heard about Moodle from a colleague of mine, a language lecturer at Dublin City University in Ireland (where Moodle has been adopted as the institutional VLE), and at first glance it looks to be a very exciting development, and long overdue. The main attraction of it must be that it's Open Source, in pleasing contrast to proprietary commercial VLEs that lock users in, and basing Moodle on social constructivism is also bound to appeal to an awful lot of teachers.
What interests me, as a Learning Technologist whose main current work is in the field of Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs), but whose previous incarnation was as a web developer of 10 years experience, is interoperability standards. In the case of VLEs, support for Question Test Interoperability (QTI) and perhaps Learning Object Models (LOMs). Scanning through the interesting threads on this forum it's plain that standards are a hot topic and that currently Moodle doesn't support them, not least because most haven't been finalised and are still wending their way through metadata committees where every lobby group and its uncle grinds its axe
My question to Moodle developers is: will Moodle support international learning standards in future versions, once standards are finalised? QTI would be a good start as I've heard (from a colleague in Scotland involved in drawing up the QTI spec) that the spec is fairly well advanced, and I'm sure teachers at my university would love the ability to shunt their question banks between systems, rather than being stuck with WebCT or Blackboard.
Oh, and someone mentioned Hot Potatoes in a thread on this forum. I'd just like to add, as someone who was in languages before this job, that IMO, and in the opinion of all my language colleagues who used it, Hot Potatoes is the bee's knees, the dog's cojones, and the cat's whiskers. It's the best test authoring system I've ever seen by some margin, and the news that it's going the XML/QTI route is very encouraging.
Cheers
Fred
Learning Technologist, School of Nursing, University of Nottingham, UK