Ian Reid :: Blog

Michelle is a trainer and ran through a basic introduction to how to set up a Moodle course

This was straightforward and had nice options for 'formats' like UniSAnet themes - eg weekly, topic, etc. This showed the sound basic pedagogical design that is inherent in Moodle.

She also helped me get my head around Moodle jargon like 'summaries', 'labels' and 'blocks'.

Martin Dougiamis is the driving force behind Moodle (I wonder how his life insurance is??). He noted that

–       4^th UK Moodle Moot

–        ‘state of the union’

–        Vision is to use the internet for ransformative and enjoyable learning

–        Moodle is becoming mainstream, not on the fringes

–        74 sites have over 20,000 users

–        Moodle tracker is the site for bug and enhancement tracking

 

Moodle 1.9

–        Not quite ready for release but is in production for Moodle.org

–        gradebook – developed by OU, competencies, groupings, performance, tags, notes, themes – these enhancements now make it very useful for UniSA

–        these will now be consolidated – for 4 months or so there will be no new substantial features – this is also good for UniSA

–        a bugathon will be in place to enhance bug fixing

 

The current wiki is poor and will be replaced – OU one or one from Spain

 

Moodle 2.0 may be a year away and will focus on repositories and portfolios

 

Eportfolios – Mahara in NZ and MyStuff from the OU – both ae integrated with Moodle – bothy will be Moodle plugins

 

Conditional activities are still to come – this relies on a concept of ‘course completion’ which Moodle doesn’t have yet

 

 

 

Denise Kirkpatrick noted that:

–        OU is a strong supporter of Moodle in both a product and a developer sense

–        Key new developments for the OU include eportfolio, new quiz, offline moodle

–        universities around the world are looking at progress in moodle to see if and when to jump to it from proprietary options

Beginning of the Moodle Moot at the OU in Milton Keynes is the usual confusion of a conference sites on a University campus rather than in a hotel - this may reflect the organisation of Moodle more broadly or just a feature of inexperience in conference organisation!

Videos of the conference sessions are available here http://mediasite.uva.nl/mediasite/Catalog/Front.aspx?cid=6b7621

So after 3 days of Sakai, what are my impressions?

 

The product:

• Technically solid, but no really large implementations out there to be sure
• Pedagogically unimpressive, and in fact is copying some of the problems with other systems like Bb
• Has a ‘UI problem’ – ie its users actually don’t like it – they need to be convinced by claims of technological superiority. This is not an argument that sways many academics

 

The community

• Small and not growing quickly enough to sustain development
• Technically very competent
• Too focused on technical matters and not enough on pedagogy
• There was a lot of talk about the ‘UI problem’ but no clear strategy for it - yet
• Has a competent board that is trying hard but needs to broaden its vision – this is not helped by scale problems (see dot 1 above)
• Dominated by research intensive American universities, not those who specialise in T&L. The University of South Africa is an exception, but we wouldn’t want to emulate them
• A bit ‘moodlephobic’
• Honest, committed and supportive

 

For all these reasons, the ideal solution to the naive would be to merge Moodle and Sakai and get the best of both worlds! But of course from a technological and political point of view, this can’t happen. You can see the sadness on nthe developers’ faces when they reaslise that all their work might in the end come to nothing – you’re talking about people’s lives here! Actually the ‘tool mashup’ idea might be a reality by the time we implement things at UniSA, allowing us to have the best of not just both, but all worlds. This would also helpus migrate from UniSAnet to new approaches – we might not have to throw out the good things in order to get more....

 

So – by the time I’ve been to the Moodle Moot in October,I should have a good handle on where these two products and communities are going ,and be able to relate them to a planning process for UniSA in ’09-’10.

Why German Universities Choose Moodle Instead of Sakai

Andreas Wittke, Rolf Granow

 

Now this should be interesting!

 

Andreas comes from Lubeck University which works in a project-based way and has experience in e-learning and Distance Education

 

Sakai replaced Luvit in 2006 for their international network

But Moodle will replace Blackboard in 2007 for their National network

 

Moodle beat Sakai for the national network because of 1 factor – student acceptance, despite arguments for the technical superiority of Sakai.

 

Moodle

• >26000 installations vs Sakai – 130 installations
• Enterprise level: Moodle 51 installations with >20 000 users
• OU – 150000 users
• Only 2 installations in the USA
• Lots of features, partners (even MS did work to make it work with IIS and SQL Server), 61 languages, 37 themes, multiple Oss
• 6 staff, 26 developers fulltime, -200 part time
• Donation system
• Ambitious roadmap

 

Decision makers decide on emotional factors, not necessarily rationally

There are too many features available to make them a choice criteria – it is easy to make one feature a deal breaker

Moodle has achieved blanket acceptance in Germany because

• Many features that ‘the customer’ likes
• Easy to install – even on the individual academic’s PC
• >700 new users every day
• 60 000 downloads per month
• Doesn’t need an administrator
• Demand comes from teachers, not developers as is the case with Sakai

 

Sakai

• Poorly marketed
• No German language web site
• No German language software

 

Trends.google.com shows that Moodle has larger growth and share than Sakai and is now competing with Bb

 

Andreas’ ideal would be to have the Sakai framework and technology with the usability and features of Moodle

 

So... the winner is:

 

Sakai is the technologists’ and the manager’s choice, Moodle is the teacher’s choice.

 

This was a terrific presentation – I can’t get across here the humour, candour and relevance!!

 

Q&A with the Sakai Board

Sakai Board

 

My reason for attending this is not to ask questions, but to get a sense of how the board and the community relate.

 

“The board has limited capacity to affect strategy” – surprising statement

 

The Sakai foundation has the funds, so much rests on how the board, as representatives of the community, can get funding from the foundation. The Foundation has a new executive director, Michael Korouska, who is on the board – and he is likely to give more focus to strategy.

 

The portfolio manager at UMich said there was a disconnect between the users’ needs and the developers – eg the ‘UI problem’ that Sakai has. She said there were fiefdoms that were presenting barriers to listening and to effecting change. There was discussion about how the Sakai people need to focus more on ‘business processes’ or ‘use cases’ or ‘teaching and learning activities’ rather than ‘tools’ as a way to describe developments. The FLUID project may assist in this.

 

The vision question elicits a process answer

 

The board doesn’t have clear goals or plans, relying instead on ‘good processes’. They are worried that having hard and fast plans may not be inclusive of all aims of community members.

 

The majority of people (but not all!) wanted the board to take more leadership.

 

This was quite a robust discussion – with lots of engagement!!

 

Sakai has a problem with ‘gap analysis’ – its development is still too supply driven rather than demand driven. It doesn’t have a good gap analysis process.

 

‘Ease of use” is the dominant problem that Sakai has. This is compounded by difficulties in communication across the dispersed community.

 

The main decision that the board has made is to shift to a program of an annual international conference and several regional meetings. There is a move to have a regional meeting in Australia soon.

Educational and Strategic Issues for University Wide OSP 2.2 Implementation

Marij Veugelers, Natasa Brouwer-Zupancic

 

Didn’t learn anything from this – we are already ahead of these initiatives

IMS Tool Interoperability (IMSTI)

Anthony Whyte, Chuck Severance

 

• Waffle bus at Boddington was used instead of standards
• The idea is having functionality mashups with IMS TI
• Chuck developed a “lite” version to prove it
• TI 2.0 will build on this and do better
• Tools can be shared between different LMSs using Shib etc
• The Sakai JSR-168 portlet both consumes and exposes
• Chris Moffatt from MS is involved
• All this is early but it is coming-it looks like IMS is starting to bear fruit

 

A good vision for any LMS but some way off

The Sakai linktool is actually better for Sakai users at present because it consumes but doesn’t expose