Serendipity35

NJIT's Instructional Technology and Media Services (ITMS) department is holding an information session this week for faculty who are interested in teaching a course this summer or fall using Sakai or Moodle as their course management system.

NJIT currently uses WebCT Campus Edition 4 as the primary course management system that supports face-to-face, hybrid and online courses. WebCT has released 2 newer products that are based on an entirely different code base (WebCT Campus Edition 6 and WebCT Vista). While these new versions promise many improvements over our current product, there are very significant hardware and software costs associated with this upgrade.

Like other universities, NJIT feels that it is in our best interest to explore some of the available open source course management systems that are alternatives to commercial products such as WebCT.

Instructors in this pilot program may use the software for an online course, or to supplement a face-to-face or hybrid course, and will then be asked to provide us with feedback to help determine the viability of using either of these products in the same capacity as we now use WebCT.

Currently more than half of NJIT's students use WebCT for coursework. That makes it an enterprise level software product.

Sakai was first introduced in January 2004 as a higher education collaborative learning environment. Initially used as a tool to help
manage content for research projects, The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT and Stanford are among the universities that have helped contribute to the Sakai project.

In NJ, Rutgers University has an ongoing Sakai Pilot Program and you can find some information at https://sakai.rutgers.edu/portal/.

Moodle is an interesting project. Where Sakai was originally developed as a platform for organizing research (not for teaching classes), Moodle was designed taking into consideration pedagogical principles and is intended to help foster online learning communities. (If you are interested in that aspect, take a look at http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy)

Moodle and Sakai have developed active development and support groups - that's very important for open-source projects because the number one fear that schools have in making the move to open source software (OSS) is SUPPORT.

Moodle has users in over 150 countries and recently the Open University in the UK has decided to use it. The OSS mantra is that the "community" will support you. Find a bug in the software? Need an API for software to work with your portal? Ask the community and a network of developers will respond. Kind of the same idea as forming user groups and sharing knowledge. It's a good mantra. I want to believe in it. Now we need to see it in action.