They have money, it's ok to charge! Look at the expense savings to districts over COVID19 across the US: transportation, lunches, subs, electricity, heat, water, all significantly less now that they are closed. Also Devos authorized on 4/06 schools to reallocate title I funding and other funding to prioritize delivering classes online. DOnt let them shit you, they have lots and lots of money.
Chad Parmentier
Beiträge von Chad Parmentier
I might as well respond to myself. Moodle should target the State Department of Educations in the US for profit. Google classroom is a joke, not even close to being able to be a stand-alone distance education platform. Now faced with COVID19 states and districts are realizing they will need a platform that can mirror the face to face environment. They are forecasting phasing schools back and many shutting down if an outbreak happens. If Moodle fails to tap this market, companies like www.K12.com who have it about 80% right will not only bury moodle in the secondary arena but probably decimate public schools with them. Moodle can empower the Instructor and hold them accountable to create quality content, while corporate versions will script the education moodle the UI of moodle and sell it to communities, districts, and states for PPE (Per Pupil Expenditure) which in some states is as high as 12 thousand dollars a year per student. It's ok to look from the code once in a while and ponder the pedagogical impact you could have on the world with this brilliant platform! Teachers teach kids, not computers or corporations!
I see what I experience, I have been fighting for moodle at multiple colleges who choose moodle because it's free than complain because its "clunky" but administered by a student aid or someone who has no clue. All the while they consider paying 130K over 3 years for canvas. But they won't put 10K into their botched moodle install or pay 50k - 80k for someone who can make moodle outperform canvas 100 to 1. what's wrong with people? is it just Americans?
Yeah well, last I knew Rackspace is about $50 bucks a month for a server plenty powerful enough to run a secondary school on moodles "Latest flavor". I say secondary because it's questionable how well distance education and online media fit into elementary schools. That being said, I guess it makes sense that teachers pour hours into typing question banks into google forms which cannot be exported anywhere versus learning how to run a real LMS which mitigates time spent on mundane tasks and has a direct effect on online pedagogy. I get there is more at play than choosing a platform, how about we put pedagogy first and not stifle those with the "brains" to implement better solutions. Sorry I still think moodle could be implemented and offered in a way that would wipe out those raping school funds in the name of "well this is best for your situation". God forbid you have to hire a human with a brain and "what would happen if they left" fear mentality.
How to stay with social constructivism in a social distancing environment?
This may seem like an odd question, but how is this new era of pandemic learning affecting social constructivist learning theory? Students of today have been social distancing for the past ten years with the rise of social media, which has a falsehood of promoting social connected ways of learning. In this time of crisis, how do we centralize the need for connectedness with the fundamentals of survival? How does this play out for K-12 and higher education when people are trying to push standards and curriculum of the old ways into a situation that needs so much more at this time? Isn't it more important to make social connections at this of need than to focus on the criteria of federal objectives? Isn't this what MOODLE was designed for? How can we create socially connected ways of learning and communication in a time of crisis and shouldn't this be our focus right now?