As we’ve gotten ready to deploy moodle 1.5.2+ this fall, we’ve done a few tweaks and additions to moodle. Since posting the PHP code seems to not work well in WordPress I’ll just link to some off-site HTML pages. Use any at your own risk!
I’m just finishing up listening to the podcast of the Auricle interview of Dublin City University’s Morag Munro on their moodle migration. It’s a good listen. They’re running moodle for 13,000 students on a single server with a backup/development server standing by. They easily linked it to their authentication system and their student information system. Had I seen this when I was in Dublin last week maybe I would have looked them up? Well, probably not. I was able to not think about work for those 2 weeks which was a record.
Back to podcasting. I’m finding I’m using podcasts as tivo for radio (which is not uncommon). My habit has been to take the podcasts for FutureTense, On The Media, and The World: Technology and burn them to CD for listening in the car. It’s been great to have my favorite radio spots whenever I want them. If I was really crafty I’d get an iTrip for my iPod and just use that. But I still like the simplicity of the CD.
My eyes lit up when I saw this article in the latest Educause Review. The title made me think back to a session I went to in 2003 – Authority of Consensus: Next-Generation Course Management System Features. I left that session thinking, “yeah, I wish CMSes did all of this.”
This article actually is a chapter in a new book, Course Management Systems for Learning: Beyond Accidental Pedagogy. It looks like it could be good. Weigel starts by noting how CMSes assumed that all the characteristics of a classroom needed to be replicated in a CMS. As our eteam report noted, do what works best face-to-face when you’re face-to-face, and do what works best online when online. From the outset CMSes were constrained pedagogically. So perhaps it’s not fair for me to be so critical of CMSes, moodle had the advantage of starting fresh and avoiding the pitfalls of standard CMS architectures. The major CMSes have grown so big they would need to be rewritten from scratch to break free of their constraints. Sure, they keep adding features to break away from the functional approach to design, but at their core the course is a collection of functions.
Weigel sets out 4 learner-centered capabilities and 4 capabilities that could be incorporated into new CMSes.
Hhhmmm, I’m seeing some moodle-like things here. Thankfully Weigel explains what these are in the article. What is knowledge management and a knowledge asset? Take a read of the article yourself to get clarification.
The 4 CMS features (second list) are pointing to moodle. Item 1 is clearly constructivist. Item 2 suggests a blurring of the concept of “a course” and opens up interdisciplinary connections. While moodle does still have “courses,” the modular nature of it allows for sharing of modules between courses. Item 3 calls out wikis and I could see glossaries as fulfilling this too. With item 4 synchronous tools are called out. While currently weak, moodle 1.5 has a strong IM component and offers easy gateways to traditional IM clients and Skype (noted in the article). I’m interested to see what our students do with the IM gateways as most of the incoming students IM constantly.
I hope Weigel has looked at moodle.
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….
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.