Comparisons and advocacy

McGraw Hill provides course content in Moodle uploaded format - we use it.  We are finding the courses are very large due to sheer amount the interactive content - but this is being looked at now.

I recently spoke to someone at Prentice-Hall/Pearson tech support and she confirmed what I suspected: Pearson populates Bb course cartridges with MS Office docs -- Word docs, PPoint presentations, etc. -- and other agnostic forms of data. These contents could be taken and uploaded into Moodle. The course cartridge for Bb makes this process faster, as it's a one-time click and everything magically appears. It would take more effort to do this in Moodle, but it can be done, according to the Pearson rep.

Two caveats:

1) Given that the interest in Moodle is increasing, I expect to see major publishers offer their contents in formats that are fully compatible with Moodle, i.e., in course-cartridge-like formats that allow for one-click importing of data. Inter-operability is the wave of the future, as publishers want to be sure that anyone and everyone can buy their stuff, not just users of a specific technology platform.

2) Even if this were not the case, you -- and all other schools looking at Moodle -- could negotiate with publishers like Pearson that your textbook adoptions are contingent upon data being compatible with Moodle. In other words, you could say, "Hey, we like this chemistry textbook, but we want to make sure that it works with Moodle. If it's not compatible, then we'll find another one that is." The publishers are not going to pass up a sale over something like this, and so would probably be willing to do what it takes to make it work. Hey -- everything is negotiable!

Peter