David Scotson

Is this conversation going round in circles now, or is it just my imagination?

I'll try to sum it up as otherwise I fear we will all continue to talk past each other:

• introducing an LMS (such as Moodle or Blackboard) is hard work, the larger the institution, the harder the work
• running a large University scale LMS, hosted on your own server requires IT staff familiar with the platform (i.e. LAMP for Moodle, Oracle, J2EE, .Net etc. for Blackboard/WebCT)
• changing from one LMS to another is even harder than introducing a new one as people have expectations, habits and skills gained from the previous system. Extra resources and staff time may be necessary to convert content, train staff and generally hold people's hands and make them feel comfortable during the transition period.
• using Moodle does not, at any stage, require a PHP (or any other kind of) programmer
• Moodle allows you (to a much greater degree than Blackboard's Building Block program) to modify it's functionality by hiring a programmer
• a cost/benefit analysis for implementing Moodle at a large university will almost certainly find that there is a net benefit to hiring/contracting/applying the time of current employees towards customisation and enhancement of Moodle.

To editorialize a bit: it seems we are still confusing what is possible and what is needed. If people were moving from Blackboard to WebCT (more likely the opposite direction actually) then if things were different then you would just have to deal with it. I have seen this with my own eyes in various software 'upgrades' where vital, and sometimes not so vital, features were sacrificed, to general dismay, as part of the move. The ability to optionally change the code and replicate or integrate current functionality is an extra benefit of Open Source solutions, not a boogey man to scare potential users with.

I was actually surprised by how accurate that report was. Perhaps my expectations were just exceedingly low.

Apart from the standard passing on out-of-date 'conventional wisdom' as if it was insightful fact (e.g. Oracle == stable, PHP == low end) it gives WebCT, BlackBoard and Sakai fairly thorough goings over with only the occasional burst of analyst-babble, e.g. "As far as scalability, both Blackboard and WebCT had a pretty clear vision."(?)

I think the paragraph on Moodle can accurately be translated as "we don't know much about this, therefore it can't be important, or else we'd look silly for not knowing much about it." Though to be fair they are there to tell people who don't know what the safe 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' option is, with an additional CYA paper trail that shows they did everything they possibly could to choose the 'best' option.

And that stuff is important when you follow their recommendations and six months later your choice gets bought by one of the also rans. Whoops.

It can't be any good because it's free

What about air, water and love?

My favorite myth is the opposite of this and they work well as a one-two combination:

We don't want a commercial system, we'll get an Open Source one instead, because companies and making money are evil!

Moodle is both Open Source and commercial, and there is absolutely no conflict between these two goals. In fact it has an entire ecosystem of individuals and companies that are making a living by providing valuable services to Moodle users, just as the average Moodle user is being paid to provide education.

In both cases you wouldn't want end users being taken advantage of for purely monetary reasons nor people and companies rushing into the field because it's an easy way to make money, but neither do you want talented individuals to switch to other careers, or for exciting projects to fail, purely due to lack of funds. By being both Open Source and commercial, Moodle offers the best of both worlds.

I'm intrigued to know what you would have the computer programmer do if he did know PHP.

Because if you had BB or WebCT instead then there's not much he could do as a programmer with them. (Building Blocks etc. being mostly nibbling around the edges).

Are we not getting mixed up between what you can do with Moodle (get access to the code, contribute changes to the community, fix bugs according to your own priorities and schedules), and what you need to do to install and run Moodle.

For a large institution, I would think that any software that is going to be used by the entire staff and student base (e.g. email) would need some administration, but not programming.

Maybe this is just a case of educationalists being a bit free and easy with IT terminology that I, as an IT guy, see clear demarcations between.

It's probably worth noting that I didn't upload that video file, I simply linked to the URL of a download on a different website that had already made it available on the web, namely.

The rest happened automatically, as the multimedia filter recognized it as a link to a file type (.mov) it knows how to deal with.