Serendipity35

NJIT is hosting a Learning Management System Demonstration on Moodle today.NJEDge.Net had previously sponsored one that was hosted by Rutgers that demonstrated their Sakai use, and as interest in both systems seems high right now as schools continue to feel dissatisfied with the support they are receiving from commercial products, they asked us to do one on Moodle. Rutgers College "decommissioned" their WebCT this summer.

NJIT has been using Moodle as an alternative to WebCT for faculty and groups since 2006, but continues to offer many courses online using WebCT CE4.

Today's event schedule includes:

• An introduction to Moodle for those who have never used it.


• Moodle at NJIT & at other schools


• Overview of the tools and features


• WebCT vs Moodle


• System admin basics


• Demos in Moodle from NJIT courses


• Migration from WebCT


• Moodle use by groups on campus


• Features up close (Quiz tool, backup/restore, gradebook...)

I'll be presenting on Moodle use in courses, and we'll have two system admins, including Serenedipity35 brother Tim Kellers, on hand to answer the IT questions.

Moodle Use in K-12

Tim wrote about Moodle being used here in New Jersey in a school that partnered with NJIT and there is significant use of Moodle in the K-12 community. It seems to be a good fit as far as the cost (open source) and customization, but not in that it requires a commitment to the all-important support side in money and especially in staffing. I'm talking both kinds of IT - the usual information type and the instructional technology, of which I'm more interested.

Might colleges expect in the next few years to have students entering who are familiar with Moodle from their high school classes?

Well, it's not being used widely enough now that I would consider it that significant, any more than the current nominal use of products like Blackboard in K-12. But I do think that in a few years the chances of your college freshman having used Moodle in high school will be better than expecting them to be familiar with Blackboard.

Some Higher Education Moodle User Sites

• UCLA recently selected Moodle as their common collaboration and learning environment (CCLE) and decided to remain engaged with the higher education community and the Sakai Foundation to pursue interoperability. There's an interesting conversation about the path to that decision on this blog. Here's a developing physics department site and a Knowledge Base site with help files.


• Montclair State University is piloting Moodle


• University of New Mexico


• Lafayette College moved from Blackboard to full use of Moodle this summer. They offer a Faculty Quickstart Guide and a Moodle Minute podcast in their iTunes U site.


• Lycoming Collegedropped WebCT in July 2006 for Moodle.


• Humboldt State has a nice site for learning to use Moodle that was put up this spring.


• University of Minnesota


• University of Louisiana at Lafayette looks to have a good number of courses listed


• Eastern Kentucky University is using Moodle for ePortfolios in educational leadership.


• Smith College moved from Blackboard to Moodle. They also have some good help & tutorials.


• University of Washington at Tacoma


• Amherst has a PowerPoint presentation online of their students' responses to Moodle that was part of a NERCOMP Moodle event during January 2007.


• University of Florida's College of Education


• Antioch College


• St. Olaf College


• SUNY-Oneonta


• And if you really want to get out there, check out Sloodle which is connecting Second Life with Moodle.
  
  K-12 Schools Using Moodle


• Science Leadership Academy (Philadelphia)


• Montclair Kimberley Academy (Montclair, NJ)


• Paul L. Dunbar HS (Kentucky)


• Clark County Schools Kentucky


• Woodford County Kentucky
  
  Moodle sites that allow you to enter a course, observe and/or edit


• First off I would send you to the source - at Moodle.org. Register for a user account, and log into one of their demonstration courses.


• At http://demo.moodle.org site you can use the most recent stable released version of Moodle from the view and permissions of an administrator, teacher or student. Though this is live, the database and files for this course are erased and restored to a clean state every hour on the hour. You can't save (or damage) it.


• Another nice feature is that you can try out the next version of Moodle at test.moodle.com


• The Paul L. Dunbar High School site offers a Moodle training course that is currently open and has a few demo screencasts.
  
  
  
  View my presentation slides online