It's after lunch. I'm at a session about Moodle by Chris Ament and Elena Ivanova. Based on my pre-session discussion with them, they feel strongly about the tools in Moodle and its ability to scale. They are running Moodle centrally in parallel with WebCT Vista. Since bringing up Moodle and with no advertising, Moodle has grown to 2000 course shells and 30,000 users per semester while WebCT Vista hasn't grown. About 250 concurrent users (typical, not peak use). Some of their users in WebCT would switch if there were tools that helped them migrate their content out of WebCT. Most of the users are in the College of Liberal Arts.
Moodle has a lot of options for user roles within a course, which cal also be set at specific item levels (e.g. one particular assignment). Version 2.0 of Moodle will be released in mid-2010. It will include a file repository for sharing across courses, a portfolio tool for pushing content to an external repository, conditional activities, and improvements to many existing tools. Faculty who favor active learning and social constructivist ideas prefer Moodle to WebCT.
Minnesota has done several integrations including: iTunesU, Wimba, Respondus, MyU (portal), and enrollment integration (Peoplesoft). Instructors link their Moodle sites with their rosters. The sync happens every 5 minutes. You can have one Moodle site with enrollments from multiple sections or enroll the same sections into multiple Moodle sites. Moodle Metacourses help with merges and splits. They currently don't create Moodle sites for every course on the books.
Server environment:
A lot of their information about Moodle can be found at: http://www.oit.umn.edu/cms-search/supporting-documents/index.htm
Moodle has a lot of options for user roles within a course, which cal also be set at specific item levels (e.g. one particular assignment). Version 2.0 of Moodle will be released in mid-2010. It will include a file repository for sharing across courses, a portfolio tool for pushing content to an external repository, conditional activities, and improvements to many existing tools. Faculty who favor active learning and social constructivist ideas prefer Moodle to WebCT.
Minnesota has done several integrations including: iTunesU, Wimba, Respondus, MyU (portal), and enrollment integration (Peoplesoft). Instructors link their Moodle sites with their rosters. The sync happens every 5 minutes. You can have one Moodle site with enrollments from multiple sections or enroll the same sections into multiple Moodle sites. Moodle Metacourses help with merges and splits. They currently don't create Moodle sites for every course on the books.
Server environment:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
- Apache 2
- MySQL 5 (with InnoDB to make it act like Oracle)
- PHP 5
- GIT (for version control)
A lot of their information about Moodle can be found at: http://www.oit.umn.edu/cms-search/supporting-documents/index.htm
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