moodle anyone?

[slipstreamsurfr]

Any Moodle developers/admins on my friends list?
http://www.moodle.org

I've gone and opened my big mouth, and I may have to build/install a moodle system for our training department soon. Looking for any recommendations or things to watch out for...

Comments

[drenilop.livejournal.com]

Are you hooked on Moodle? I used a variant of it last year and found it terribly clunky and not very pleasant. The Sakai consortium has another open source Course/Project Management platform (http://sakaiproject.org/). It's a flexible thing that works equally well for collective (non-hierarchical) project management as well as more hierarchical things like educational purposes (assignments, tests, etc.).

Dunno precisely what you're going to need it for, but you might find it useful to at least look at this as an alternative. If you want to explore a functional site, beyond the demo ones online, let me know and I'll add you to one or two of the ones that I control.

[pat-trick.livejournal.com]

i echo these thoughts on sakai. i've tested both moodle and sakai, and sakai is far more flexible.

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

thanks for the recommendation.

I'm not wed to the idea of using moodle, it's just the one I had first heard of a couple of years ago when I first pitched the idea to our training department. They are looking at building some online learning modules for use in the company with things like graded quizes

I found out today that they are looking at some for pay type systems and pitched again open source... being that I work for a non profit, I'd rather we not spend when we don't have to..

I'll dig into the demo sites first, thanks for the offer. I'll let you know if I need to go further :)

[drenilop.livejournal.com]

I'm speaking as an educational user of all three systems over the last three years.

I'd go Sakai over Moodle any day if they want quizzes and gradable stuff. My experience with the Moodle variant and that tool - which I stupidly tried after everyone else said not to but "IT" told me they had done some great upgrades and it will work really really well - is nothing but negative. My use of the Sakai platform for that, however, was several years ago on an earlier variant, and it worked really well. They even have (or at at UMich at least) a feature that would randomize question order and time your access to the exam.

Blackboard's a slicker interface, I think, and it allows you to make a lot more radical changes to the structure of the site and the organization of the material, but unless you're doing something really unusual with it, I don't think the cost is worth the upgrade. If you're not entirely familiar with it, or don't take a solid training, the number of options is just overwhelming.

[slipstreamsurfr.livejournal.com]

Well, in this case I am "IT" but I'm trying to be intelligent "IT" and look at what real users like. I've been bit too often by too many projects that are bought before folks looked at what all was available. I do think they are looking at blackboard, but they start to suffering a bit of sticker shock when they look at it too closely...

I'll give Sakai a closer look. Thanks for the recommendations from a real user. I appreciate it.