If you didn't have a chance to attend the webinar, you can view it on-demand here.
During the event, it was great to see so many audience questions sent to our presenters. Although Buddy and Rob didn't have the chance to address all of them, we've been compiling them over the past few weeks. Below we've provided answers to the questions that were asked most frequently:
Q: Could you address the presentation tool Kaltura in Moodle and how can one access it?
A: Moodlerooms makes the Kaltura Moodle plug-in available through core Moodle and through its enterprise learning management platform, joule. Kaltura enables the use of video and rich media in the teaching environment giving institutions the ability to easily, quickly, and cost-effectively enhance their courses with video and interactive rich-media functionality that includes creating and managing audio and video within the LMS in addition to searching, uploading, importing, editing, annotating, remixing, sharing, and advertising content.
Q: Often, the faculty perception is that an open source, specifically Moodle, isn’t flexible enough to provide for specific needs. How do I combat this perception?
A: As stated in a recent newsletter by Linda Briggs of Campus Technology Magazine:
To reference a campus of over 27,000 students, Louisiana State University now has nearly every undergraduate currently taking at least one course that makes use of the university’s choice of Moodle as its open source learning management system. That sort of heavy participation points to the reasons behind LSU’s decision two-plus years ago to move from Blackboard and an in-house system. A huge draw for LSU, according to LMS Administrator Buddy Ethridge, is the fact that Moodle is open source, making the software extremely flexible and adaptable to an individual institution’s needs.
Speaking to LSU’s focus on flexibility, “With so many users and a legacy student information system that must work with the LMS, changes to the system—both large and small—aren’t uncommon, making Moodle’s flexible nature extremely important. LSU’s partnership agreement with Moodlerooms includes the ability to contribute code to the software to alter the LMS's appearance and functionality in just about any way possible.”
Q: For a university as large as LSU, why not host Moodle yourselves? How did you decide on Moodlerooms?
A: As stated in a recent newsletter by Linda Briggs of Campus Technology Magazine:
Moodlerooms’ cloud hosting method saves the university (LSU) the cost of on-site hardware, updates, backup, security, support staff, and more. And the savings of allowing a vendor to host the software offsite go beyond the obvious surface costs, Ethridge points out. “It’s an issue not only of allocation of resources such as databases,” he says, “but also the power footprint in the [computer] room, and all kinds of other costs we would incur… It’s much cheaper for us to outsource than to support the system in-house.”
Q: Is the 85% savings that was mentioned the "total cost of ownership"?
A: Yes, the cost savings mentioned by Ethridge were based on LSU’s total cost of ownership.
Q: What version of Moodle are both universities currently using?
A: Both Universities are currently using Moodle version 1.9.
Q: When LSU moved to Moodle, did they migrate courses from another LMS, or did they start from scratch?
A: Two years ago, LSU decided to migrate its courses (based in a commercial LMS and an in-house created system) to Moodle.
Q: If you are using Moodlerooms, how flexible are they about you making changes to a college’s site?
A: Moodlerooms offers its customers flexibility on many levels. From the course template to modules, blocks, third-party integrations, services and especially the site’s look and feel, Moodlerooms can shape their learning management platform to fit existing learning programs perfectly.
Q: Does Moodlerooms provide customizations and maintenance to those customizations?
A: Moodlerooms constantly develops new features or integrations to meet the evolving needs of customers. But we understand that not every client is the same, and that's the benefit of our open-source core -- the flexibility to extend your application with features tailored to meet your organization's unique requirements. If customers have a specific feature request that would further support the success of your learning program, Moodlerooms can provide services to develop a custom solution that is tested for security and stability before being integrated with a customer’s site.
Q: Would you be able to run Moodle (with Moodlerooms services) without a PHP developer on staff?
A: Moodlerooms is a full-service provider of Moodle and maintains the code base of all clients, so PHP developer isn’t required of institutions.
Q: How did you ease faculty concerns of migrating to the Moodle LMS? Students?
A: As stated by Buddy Ethridge in a recent newsletter by Linda Briggs of Campus Technology Magazine:
“Moving students to a new system of any sort is usually relatively easy,” Ethridge says, “and Moodle was no exception – the reception by students was “excellent… Students seem to take to change very easily.” To ease faculty transition to the new system, always a bigger challenge, LSU made an instructional technologist available specifically for hands-on consultation, either by phone or at faculty offices. That strategy helped harried, change-averse faculty at LSU make the move to the new system far more smoothly.
From the LSU Moodle adoption case study:
"By utilizing Moodle, LSU was able to dramatically increase LMS usage, increase training and support options, and significantly reduce reaction time — all within the financial footprint of its previous commercial LMS. Only one year after it was deployed, LSU’s learning management system saw:
- Concurrent usage as high as 24,000 users
- Average of 12,000 users during peak usage times
- 40% increase in instructor participation
- 140% increase in user adoption
Q: Can a classroom teacher use Moodlerooms for their classroom?
A: Moodlerooms offers individual teacher hosting packages. For more information, please contact a Moodlerooms sales representative directly, here.
Q: Would Moodlerooms be good for a small graduate school without the larger resources of a university?
A: Moodlerooms’ solutions can be shaped to fit institutions of any size or scope by eliminating the need to purchase costly hosting infrastructure. All that is required is a computer with internet access via an industry standard web browser.
Q: Are there tutorials covering how to use Moodle and some of its ad-ons via the web?
A: Another benefit of the 35 million member Moodle community is the wealth of “how-to” documentation and video tutorials created by Moodle users.
- docs.moodle.org has comprehensive database of quick reference documents here.
- Moodlerooms has an FAQ database accessible here.
- The New Jersey Institute of Technology has compiled over 30 informative video tutorials here.
A: For details regarding Moodlerooms' comprehensive, deliverables-based training programs, please visit here.
No comments:
Post a Comment