Learning the World

Humboldt State

• Forerunner in Moodle work.
• Conducted student survey: Blackboard vs. Moodle: A Comparison of Satisfaction with Online Teaching and Learning Tools

Experiences at Amherst

• Some students liked having everything e-mailed to them, others hated it.
• Students said documents were easier to find in Moodle than in Blackboard, because it was easier to figure out where teachers put things.
• Students strongly liked the idea of using a learning management system.
• Students liked Moodle more, but not overwhelmingly so.
• Results mirror those elsewhere. Students generally like moodle more, organization is better, makes more sense to them.

Faculty perspectives on Moodle from Smith Colleges.

German Instructor

• Upload image galleries – zip, then upload, then upload.
• Used German glossery — items submitted by student, edited by teacher. Useful for correcting student errors but time consuming.

Psych Instructor

• Students tend to ignore side columns.
• Time outs uploading files from off campus via dialup.
• Problem with calculating percentage grades in moodle because of optional grades.
• Fractional grades also a problem, but may be solved in Moodle 1.7.
• Problems with excel export.

• UCLA, Open University are now using Moodle.
• Moodle support offered through Moodle.com, which is something I need to look into. Having a Moodle authority to talk to would be great.
• demo.moodle.org provides a working test version of Moodle that gets initialized every hour. Good place to go break things.
• Lesson module looks very interesting, allowing for students to assess one another. I need to try setting up one of these.
• The wiki module is much more robust than I thought, allowing for detailed histories and most of the wiki tools you’d expect.

Just in the nick of time (since we go live with our Moodle pilot on Monday), I’m attending a Moodle Interest Group conference hosted by NERCOMP (Northeast Regional Computing Program). It’s a mix of basic introductory information (much of which we already know) with good experiential information from faculty and IT people who have it deployed.

As part of evaluating WordPress Mu for possible use at Lafayette College, I’m looking for reviews of the software. If anyone has any, please post them to the comments section.

Giving Blogs with WPMU
http://blogsavvy.net/giving-blogs-with-wpmu

Multi user blog tools – overall ratings and reviews
http://blogsavvy.net/multi-user-blog-tools-overall-ratings-and-reviews

The ITS Coffee Break helps faculty and staff at Lafayette keep their New Year’s resolutions to clean up their web sites and learn about multimedia editing with news of the upcoming Web Design Day and Audio & Video Project Planning workshops. In Tech News, Courtney Bentley and I give a roundup of education technology blogs, while in Help News we discuss the rest of ITS’s January term workshop offerings. Visit Soapbox to get the episode and read the show notes.