Where are you now? What’s your motivation?

On September 12, 2007, in admins, ID, instructors, LMS, Moodle, policy, sysadmins, trainers, by admin
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So, where are you? What IS your motivation?

You could be a designer charged with learning the new LMS system and creating “trainings” and helping instructors create courses – and designing templates, too…

You could be an interested instructor – seeking to get ahead of the game and hone your e-Learning or online teaching skills…

You could be an instructor faced with changing LMSs – perhaps your institution ditched WebCT or Blackboard for the lower cost Moodle alternative? You’re faced with learning a new system and hoping that your course migrates to the new one and that you can get it up and running with minimal expenditure of your already sparse time and effort…

You could be faced with the decision to choose an LMS system: you’re an administrator, a faculty member, an IT person, a designer. You’re a chosen one, checking things out and evaluating what’s available and how it will “fit” with your institution…

You may have stumbled upon eLearning and discovered LMSs with the goal of “saving time”, “reducing on-campus time”, “teaching remotely”, and “ditching the physical classroom”- if for no reason other than convenience and reducing or avoiding a commute…

Whomever you are, whatever description, whether it’s one of these or any number of others, fit you…you’ve come to the right place.

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Moodle – What is it?

On September 12, 2007, in admins, ID, instructors, LMS, Moodle, policy, sysadmins, trainers, by admin
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Moodle is an open-source learning management system (LMS). It has been around for awhile. Currently, it’s the hot “new” system in competition with other LMS courseware systems – both public and private – such as WebCT/Blackboard, Angel Learning, Desire2Learn, Sakai, ETUDES NG, and various textbook publisher versions of LMS systems.

The draw of Moodle is that it’s low-cost in comparison to the other LMS systems out there – both private and open-source. Moodle is freely distributed to anyone who downloads it with a GPL license. It is relatively easy to set up and start building courses on. “Out-of-the-box” it is meant for non-enterprise deployment. Anyone hosting with a provider who has Apache, PHP, MySQL installed can pretty much get this system up and running. That’s the backend – and indeed, if you’re a geek you can do this yourself at home [but research security first - especially with student data and FERPA or PPRA]. From the instructor perspective, creating courses is relatively simple. The complexity varies depending upon the customization of the system (what bells and whistles have been “added on”) and if your Moodle installation is affiliated with an institution rather than your own “private” hosting. Meaning, if it’s hosted at a school, you’ve got to abide by their systems and processes, whereas if you’re hosting it yourself – well, get in there and just start building!

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