Ah-ha! Now I realize why I didn’t see eye-to-eye with that article. Their motivation for changing CMSes was to standardize on 1 CMS and thus save money, understandable for a large university system. Our motivation is first pedagogical and secondly financial. Our faculty’s teaching goals are not being met with Blackboard. I believe moodle will meet them now and in the future as they grow and change. We don’t need a course management system, we need a virtual learning environment. I should banish the CMS acronym from my blog….
The latest issue of the Educause Quarterly has an article called “Changing Course Management Systems: Lessons Learned.” It describes the NDSU switchover from Blackboard to desire2learn. We had evaluated d2l for our campus too. It’s a nice CMS and a company with the right direction (see my ramblings here and here). Though cheaper than Blackboard, it’s still too expensive for a school of our size.
But as I was reading the article a few things started to gel in my head. First, there is a problem inherent in talking about “conversion” from one CMS to another. If you convert a course from Blackboard to d2l, you will be retaining the constraints of the old CMS that you are running away, um, getting away from. To leverage the benefits of the new CMS, you need to consider a redesign of some depth:
Or some gradation of the above.
Their findings also caused me to react. Yes, there will be costs in time and money for the faculty in switching CMSes, depending how much they invested in the CMS. If you do something like AugNet Course Docs then your content is external to the CMS so migration is much less painful. The time of CMS transition can been framed as a time for change and re-evaluation of courses. As you can tell from above, I disagree with their concerned focus on conversion tools. But I do agree with their implication of CMS-neutral design (SCORM anyone?).
I’m making my way through the changes you can see on moodle.org now that it has been upgraded to moodle 1.5. Here are some highlights
Both look like winners. I hope 1.5 is ready for fall. It’s definitely the release suitable for the campus.
This is probably the largest deployment of moodle globally to date. Read about it here. To quote
“The Open Polytechnic, Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology, and six other polytechs are already using the system. Twelve other tertiary institutes, including four universities, will likely migrate to Moodle by July, Mr Wyles says. It’s also being deployed at 10 secondary schools.”
The modular (the m in moodle) nature was a real plus for them.
As we’ve been testing moodle out we’ve also been tweaking the code to meet our needs. If anyone is interested in copies of the code snippets just let me know.
We have a few more minor changes in the pipeline but these were some of the main tweaks we wanted to do. The modular and open nature of the code makes these changes easier as you go along.