Frances Bell

Andy,

You didn't mention what would be on- and what would be off-line.  Were you thinking that the 'construction' phase would be classroom-based?  I am interested in ways of supporting online reflection of offline concrete experiences when there is a real reason to do so.  That reason might be that small groups who have been working separately come together to share their experiences and broaden their learning, often in the telling as well as the listening.

I have used Kolb's cycle to analyse such a situation, and it helped to show up the different contributions that students could make based in part on their experiences outside the classroom.

Frances

This is a good summary of one sub-thread David, but seems to cover the situation once decision to move to Moodle is made. The Top 10 myths de-bunking is (presumably) aimed at decison-makers or those who influence them, and they will be looking for case studies and hard evidence on total cost of ownership and user satisfaction in transitions similar to their own.

The next thread in this forum is coming up with some interesting suggestions for changes to Moodle (many already in progress apparently).  It is a strength of Moodle that it is in continuous evolution but this moving target effect does make evaluation more difficult.

As I said in an earlier posting "what published evidence do we have of total cost of ownership in larger implementations? Has anything been published from New Zealand project?"

Have evaluations of large-scale implementations of Moodle been published?

I know that feelings run high but just because flimsy evaluations are aired at a Gartner  meeting, does not mean that Moodle's reputation as a scalable product will be built from Moodle-org community enthusiasm alone.

What can we do as a community to critically evaluate Moodle's scalability?

ATW said "From a migration standpoint, course conversion tools are a must.  That is something Moodle has on the other systems!  It may not be perfect, but it is at least present!"

I could not agree more.  Moodle has the enormous advantage from teacher perspective that courses can be backed up by teacher not just admin.  Same teachers who appreciate this once in Moodle will be put off if their work on a previous VLE cannot be converted easily to Moodle (especially since the limitations of Blacboard, etc mean that export of data from BB/WebCT must be done by administrator).

Moodle must appeal to all the relevant user groups admin, student, teachers, management.  Not all installations will have these roles rolled into one.