Comparisons and advocacy

Hi, Sean. We have been using Moodle for a couple of years now and had about 300 or so students that used it last year, well over 500 this year. We have about 650 'active' courses - meaning that a student will hit that course sometime during the school year. About 25 of our faculty use Moodle in some way - everything from just one introductory course, to every single course their students are in.

We are really doing this with three people - all in addition to our full-time duties.

I handle all the implementation, customization, initial training, etc. I may spend as little as just a couple hours a week on this, to all my time for a few days (when we upgrade major versions, etc.). I use plugins to automate user creation, course enrollments, etc., so we very seldom need to spend any time with that.

A technical staff member of our staff spends about 10-15 hours each week helping instructors with whatever they may call about, building step-by-step guides, and urgent needs.

We also have a curriculum person that spends just a few hours a week helping instructors with curriculum design, awareness, etc.

All told, MAYBE one full-time position, but we also require teachers to develop their own courses, which has really slowed down implementation in my opinion. I don't see any really advanced courses that I know can be done in Moodle, although I do see some stuff with real potential, good ideas that need to be built upon. We're not sharing our content as well as we should be, and ideas such as learning object repositories keep getting put on the back burner because there's no one with time to work on it. Many teachers need more hand-holding than we can give them, so if they can't figure it out from the training and step-by-steps, they just don't go any further - but if the course is developed for them, they use it like crazy!

We did some benchmarking and research a couple of years ago that really said we needed about 5 positions to do this right, with the level of activity we could be doing. But we can't always get what we want, so we make it work with what we have. Lots of up-front time automating the install will reduce the manpower needed once you're up and running.

Thanks,
Matt