I'm in Michigan for a couple of days, here with some others from Penn State to talk about our collective ANGEL experience and discuss what we are going to do now that ANGEL has been purchased by Blackboard. This afternoon, we had two institutions talk to us about their experiences with Moodle and Sakai. More than anything, it reinforced something that I have felt from the beginning:
The decision has to be about flow, not features.
Here's how I see it: If you were to compare cats and dogs with a feature checklist, you may conclude that they are essentially the same. Four legs: check. Furry: check. Tail: check. Runs fast: check. Pointy teeth: check. Tail: check. And so on ... you get the idea. It's only when you step away from their components and watch them play that you start to get a sense of how they are not only unique species, but that your interaction with one or the other will be fundamentally different. The flow of your life will change based on the characteristics of the pet you select.
Plus, once you buy a pet, you're going to have it for a decade or two, so choose wisely!
So as I said above, I got to see how Moodle and Sakai users interacted with their systems today. I got to watch their flow. It told two different stories. Moodle is built around the model of an interactive syllabus. There is a chronological order to the course, from top to bottom, and you embed artifacts along the way. Week 1 (or lesson/unit 1) is at the top of the moodle home page for each course. Within week 1, you see a description, resources, maybe a quiz or discussion board or drop box, and then there is a line to mark the end of week 1 so that week 2 can begin. Surrounding the syllabus are tools for the user that change depending on their access rights - so instructors can do all sorts of course management things and students can track their gradebook progress. The home page seemed a bit long, but it seemed easy, especially for our faculty who are used to organizing their materials under the lessons tab. It may actually be better because you can wrap context around each collection of resources and activities.
I went into the meeting wanting to love Sakai, but I can say that I wasn't impressed. It has similar features, but it is based around a toolbox model. You pick which tools you want to use in a course and they appear in a menu on the left of the screen. So you choose the syllabus link and it shows you what you need to do on which week. Then you go to a resources link to view materials - all of the resources are together, organized into folders if you like. But if you have a discussion assignment, you need to leave the resources and go to the forums link. If you have a quiz, you have to go to the assessments link. So the grouping is by tool, not by time.
I asked the Sakai presenter a few questions. He admitted that Sakai isn't based around an academic workflow. I asked if there was at least a tool that would show faculty what they need to do (what's new, what needs to be graded) - nope, they would have to check each tool to see if there is something new. The presenter said that you could create links from content to activities by copying the computer-generated URL for a forum and pasting it into the content. I lived through this kind of work-around back when we ran WebCT and the problem is that the links work -- but only until you copy the content into a new course section, at which point all of the links still point back to the old course section. It's a mess.
I don't know if either of these CMS's are right for us. I'd like us to end up with a light weight system that can be easily extended to permit innovation. My point is that even when the features check out, the flow may be counter to natural faculty and student patterns. Our faculty are extremely busy people. In my experience, faculty are very appreciative when you put systems in place that save them time.
