Comparisons and advocacy

Hi All,

I posted this on Moodle Buzz, but it hasn't yet appeared to the rest of the world after more than a week, so here goes. A small additional note - LSE has been using WebCT since 1999-2000, but we've now decided to go with Moodle, see below for details...

Kris.

LSE to adopt Moodle as the new institutional VLE [original blog article]
Following a year of evaluation, the London School of Economics and Political Science has decided to adopt Moodle as its Virtual Learning Environment.

We believe Moodle has many advantages for both staff and students and these were clearly flagged up during our pilots. They include:

• Easier to use (for both staff and students); courses can be developed and updated much more easily than WebCT.
• More powerful and flexible with a range of new features including learning journals, blogs and wikis that can be used for teaching
• Much greater flexibility over ways in which courses are organised: you can choose to organise your course on a weekly basis (probably the most common option) but also by topic or around a discussion board.
• It also has much greater control and flexibility over who can be given permission to access the course.
• More flexible discussion tools.

A key advantage of Moodle, is that as it is an open source system, it can be developed and customised in ways in which the School wants. Completely new tools and features can be added and we can share features developed elsewhere. The Open University for example, since its adoption of Moodle has developed a number of important new features and these are made freely available to the rest of the Moodle community... more.