OU blog

Activities ::: mod_oublog
Maintained by sam marshall, Jason Platts, Alan Thompson, Alan Carter
Part of set Open University.
Alternative blog. Can be used as a course activity.
Me at the Moodle Moot NZ11
Stuart Mealor
Wednesday, 23 April 2014, 2:38 PM
Usability
9/10
Accessibility
9/10
Technical
8/10
General comments

We were looking to use Moodle as a blogging platform for a specific project, and tested various configurations of the standard Moodle Blog, and this OU Blog plugin.  You can see the results of this implementation on our group blogging site: http://elearningblog.moodlebites.com

The key factors that resulted in us settling on the OU Blog were:

  • It's possible to allow any visitor to the site to leave a comment - just like a WordPress, Blogger, or similar site.  And the fact that Comments have to be approved by the person who made the post (which comes through via email) means no spam - just awesome!
  • The Blg can be setup in such a way that all the entries by different users appear as one single blog - which means readers can see the contributions of all in one place smile

Overall we're really pleased with this module, and the functionality it's given us to run a professional blogging site using Moodle smile

Usability

The OU Blog is really interesting in that it optionally allows all Participants to create a single blog - which gives the activity quite a different feel, and opens very different possibilities for how it can be used.

Accessibility

We have built our blogging environment around this OU Blog plugin, and the main thing to note is that you should turn off the standard Blog module in Moodle, because otherwise it's quite very confusing to users about where to add and read entries.

Technical

We haven't test this module with a large/busy site, quite the opposite, we only have around a dozen users of the site.  However, as the module is developed by the Open University, who have enormous Moodle sites in terms of users and traffic, it's a fair bet that it will work well under load! wink