She uses moodle at university and loves it, but I think that she should try out other completely free options to see how successful (or not) the courses will be.

Reading all the comments has confirmed my thoughts that there are other, entirely free ways that she could run these modules.

Thank you very much, guys (and guyettes!) :-)

http://www.eLearningZoom.com

From the interface development side, its major drawback is the poor style coding within the html. The HTML is supposed to be the cake and CSS the icing. Well this cake had icing, nuts, screws, nails all in it. 90% of divs had a minimum of four classes and 1 id tag. And every other tag had inline styles in the HTML! You can’t adjust that. Some inputs had styles some didn’t. Absolute chaos.

Any non-table neanderthal could see that the developers working on Moodle’s front-end coding are just plain confused, because the thing is so freaking adhoc. The result is that it definitely limits creating an interface that is not only aesthetically appealing but aesthetically functional. Inclusion of features that augment the user experience and enhance ease of use are truly difficult.

But thank god it’s not impossible to surmount this garbage mountain. I did it, so look out for finally a good design using Moodle in the next few months. Moodle needs to realise that not only content is important but the way how you present the content makes it accessible.

I have been a keen advocate of Moodle for some years now. It is customizable, extendable and one of the more intuitive systems I have come across. I would certainly say it is an Enterprise level product (Open University UK use it with tens of thousands of users) while having a zero cost point to purchase.

While not without it’s flaws, I do think it is one of the better systems out there. Check out my blog for more details on what you can do when you invest some time with Moodle

Anyway Moodle is definitely getting there, but don’t take my subjective view let the world-wide statistics speak for themselves:

Registered sites: 41291
Courses: 1827266
Users: 18793534
Teachers: 1878145
Enrolments: 20046737
Forum posts: 22067840
Resources: 13260588
Quiz questions: 16533755

This is on April 5th ‘08 – see here for latest stats : http://moodle.org/stats/

I would be interested to hear about a more popular LMS/VLE – but I won’t hold my breath! ;)

Cheers,

Jimmy T (UK)

WebCT is *awful*
The lecturers can’t use it, so it was plagued with broken links or missing items, it’s slow, whinges when i use browsers that render things properly (opera and safari) and just generally looks hideous.

Moodle has a poor interface.
But at least it allows for a usable discussion, as opposed to webCT where it’s antiquated system is so awful to use most people don’t bother.

But all my lecturers could work out how to use moodle – they got notes up on time, many of them even actually used the discussion/wiki modules and provided extra support for students. Never ended up with things saying “replace this heading” like someone had taken a slab of copy pasta and dumped it on all the pages at the beginning of each semester (as was the case with webCT).

These points alone make it far better than webCT.

I used to design my own course web site with Dreamweaver and my own ISP. I thought it worked great. But when I tried ti train non-tech people on it, they all gave up because it was al just too complicated. Moodle, otoh, is fun and easy to use.

I use it to post lots of content–in MS Office format, pdf, or easy to create web pages. post assignments on a calendar, create links to web contact, give online quizzes, and have students upload their assignments and use the connected gradebook, too. All these features were easy to learn and work handily. The discussion boards are GREAT! They are local, not centralized, so it’s much easier to keep discussions separate. Complex discussion boards are confusing to many students.

Moodle is cautiously exploring the social network approach, but, to be frank, moodle’s strength is for teacher-moderated sites. Use Ning if you want the benefits of a social network for your class–but be prepared to give up the educational features built into Moodle.

Moodle’s default UI is not beautiful, but there are many themes you can choose for free and for a small fee and they are easy to install.

I think 3 Lane has it all wrong. My experience has been just the opposite of his/hers. I think the original article had it right.

Moodle is ‘free’- or kind of (not including support, hosting ect). However it allows teachers to assess, to organize classes and to facilitate discussion easily. Sure, it would be nice to give each student a blog, discussion board account and Gmail account. However unless you can host in house, restrictions prevent you from that. Get a moodle installation going and you’re good.