Jan
19
2007
Humboldt State
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.
Jan
19
2007
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.
Jan
19
2007
- 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.
Jan
19
2007
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.
