I’ve playing recently with moodle , an open-source CMS grounded heavily in social constructionist pedagogies. While it’s initial look is a little silly (the colors and fonts), diving deeper one finds a better way of teaching and learning online.
As we explore different CMSes — desire2learn , Sakai — moodle has come back under our microscope. We had looked at it several months ago and it seemed not quite ready to use. But now it seems a little more mature. An it’s getting some use regionally at St Olaf and Macalester .
The initial impression, the fonts and colors, are all easily changed with style sheets — just look at Macalester’s. The real benefits come in the structure of the course sites. The main way to organize is chronologically by week. One adds activities to each week — discussions, assignments, content files. The available activities are modules that are independently developed and plugged in to moodle. It also supports a “recent activity” feature (that I’m a fan of in general) that tells you what’s changed in the course site. And the forums support RSS which is a big plus for me.
I plan to play with it some more and see if it’s a viable CMS platform.
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