8 polytechs in New Zealand adopting moodle

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.

Augsburg modifications to moodle

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.

• Forum post emails don’t link back into moodle and neither do the RSS feeds – this breaks our single sign-on system.
• Forum replies in threaded form were too spaced out. We tightened up the reply spacing.
• HTML and Text resources automatically have a link in the upper-right of “Return to {shortname}” which takes you back to the course page.
• User’s can’t change their email addresses or id numbers. These are set with their accounts are auto-created by database authentication. The id numbers are needed for enrollment so those shouldn’t be editable!
• In the gallery module I added a top frame with appropriate navigation and made the gallery description more readable by placing it in a box. However the automatic advancing of images seems to have broken. I’m looking into that.

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.

moodle vs Blackboard study, and some blogs

Well, “study” might be a strong word. They were attempting to answer “Can free software satisfactorily meet the needs of students, faculty, and instructional technologists for online teaching and learning?”

The answer seems to be “yes.” You can find details here.

Also, a few people are trying moodle in their courses and are writing about it….
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sloan-c consortium has taken to moodle

I just noticed that sloan-c has chosen moodle for its asynchronous environment for its workshop series “sloan-c online workshop series: how online can be better than on-ground: constructivism, collaboration, community “. You’ll recognize sloan-c from …
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