[school-discuss] Re: [IIEP] Do know about any Moodle implementation in your institution?

[Rob Rittenhouse <rob@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Michael Porterfield wrote:
> Rob and others:
>
> I liked what you said in your email concerning moodle. We are in a 
> similar spot at my university and need to switch to another CMS and we 
> are looking at Moodle.
>
> Right now, we are using Blackboard and we have been using it for years 
> but the rising cost is just impossible for us to continue.
>
> So we have all this Blackboard content/classes, was it difficult for you 
> to switch to Moodle from Blackboard? Is there a tool to do a conversion 
> for you?

Well, you might want to contact my colleague, Dr. Alicia Wyatt 
(awyatt@xxxxxxx) as she actually did most of the conversion work (I was 
tech. support which mostly meant I said "I don't know if we want to try 
that" to Alicia a lot).

Some things we found:

Moodle does have import capabilities for BB material and quizzes. They 
work reasonably well.

It turned out most Blackboard usage on our campus was not very 
sophisticated.

Moodle and Blackboard have different organizing concepts and you often 
have to rearrange things after import.

Moodle is very flexible -- we ended up setting up and recommending a 
default course layout to reduce confusion for students in different 
courses.

Faculty should avoid getting carried away and adding every available 
block/module.

I personally was surprised by the adaptive quiz feature of Moodle 
(Moodle allows trying again on a question, part of constructivist 
influence and I had not realized that the first time I made an online test).

You definitely want to invest time in training.
--
Robert G. Rittenhouse, Chair
Computer Science
McMurry University
Abilene, TX 79697