David Scotson

Be aware that the results include many duplicates (e.g. different faculties at Glasgow, and the STACK maths system seems to link from 3 different URLS) but also that it doesn't include every Moodle in UK HE e.g. it doesn't find this site at Strathclyde University:

http://neo.ces.strath.ac.uk/moodle/

That query was designed to avoid false positives, i.e. point to nothing but Moodle sites, even if it missed a few Moodles, but another revealing search query is this:

inurl:moodle site:.ac.uk

This search relies on the observation that because of Moodle's catchy branding, many users seem to include that name in the url. Bear in mind that these are not all Moodle sites, though all are web pages that refer to Moodle in some way (JISC user mailing lists etc.) which is interesting data in itself.

The big campus wide adopters in UK HE are Glasgow and Goldsmiths (which someone else linked to above), at least as far as I am aware, but you might also be interested in looking at Dublin City University in Ireland who have some good documentation online about their choice of Moodle.

One way to find Moodles in use in FE and HE for the UK is by doing the following search on Google:

"Some courses may allow guest access" site:.ac.uk

It's not guaranteed to return every existing Moodle (e.g. they might be hidden from public access, in different languages or not yet indexed by Google) but as you can see there is a wide variety of usage in the sector.

Note that many places, particularly larger institutions, start with Moodle in a single department or faculty before moving to campus wide adoption. This potential for following a low-risk, measured roll-out approach is in fact a key benefit of Open Source, and therefore Moodle, adoption.

That's the model we followed at the University of Glasgow where Moodle was used by my department (GUIDE before being adopted as a centrally supported VLE. The size of our institution and its decentralized nature means we now have many independent yet interconnected Moodles, which you'll see if you follow the Google link given above.

I think it's important for people thinking about moving to Moodle to be public about it, as education organizations seem to have a bit of a herd mentality when it comes to IT adoption, which we may as well take advantage of. Given that Moodle has been in use in the sector for a while now, and is generally well received, combined with Open Source becoming 'respectable', even quite fashionable, in UK education circles in the last 12 months and that many multi-year license deals with proprietary alternatives are coming to an end, I could well imagine a mass-switchover to Moodle occurring. In fact I've already read two articles worrying that a Moodle monopoly would be as bad as a proprietary one. That's not an opinion I agree with, but it at least shows the mindshare that Moodle has.

That article seemed quite journalistic, so the cynic in me went to check it out. However a search for Moodle on the SFSU website uncovered Moodle Job Opportunities and plans for the switchover to Moodle in Senate meeting notes (along with some gushing praise for Moodle).

If anyone's interested in the knee-jerk reactions of uninformed teenage geeks to Moodle and it's Open Source brethren then they should check out Ask Slashdot: An Open Source Alternative to Blackboard?

Actually, in all honesty you find some interesting stuff on Slashdot if you know how to navigate the responses to cut out all the nonsense. In various previous entries related to VLE's I've found various personal stories from actual students who've been exposed to various VLEs (though normally at the tech-savvy, Comp Sci end of things) and from VLE administrators supporting various systems. The feedback is generally more, um, 'candid' than you get in press releases, official announcements, and feedback surveys so probably worth a look.

I'm not sure if you are looking for a 'system' or have just run into a User Interface dead-end. When there are too many teachers to list you need to search for the people you want to add by entering part of their name in the search box. This is fairly obvious once you've done it but it stopped me in my tracks the first time I arrived at that screen.