Last Thursday, March 10th, we held a webinar entitled, "CHANGE: Migrating from a Legacy LMS to an Open-Source Moodle Platform." Considering the theme of LMS migration is so broad, we've dedicated our last few webinars to the many considerations to take into account before beginning the evaluation, selection and transition process.
For our March 10th webinar, we focused on the topic of SIS/ERP integration with a new LMS solution and highlighted two unique Moodlerooms customers that recently transitioned to joule and implemented a comprehensive solution that connected seamlessly with their campus' existing Datatel administrative systems. If you didn't get a chance to see the webinar, check it out here.
With so many questions submitted from attendees, we wanted to answer as many of them as possible. Today, we're featuring responses from webinar presenter, Robert Morgan, Campus Director of the Beatrice Campus and the Dean of Virutal Learning for Southeast Community College in Nebraska.
Your previous and current LMS, were they a hosted solution by company or was it hosted by your college?
Robert Morgan (RM): "Our previous LMS, ANGEL, was hosted by our college. When we began our most recent evaluation process, it was our intention to move away from self hosting to a hosted solution in the cloud. This is our first opportunity to experiment with hosting applications in the cloud. We wanted to move to the Dell cloud because our IT team isn't as skilled with LMS. Actually, they're most comfortable with our Datatel administrative systems, so it helps to have a provider maintain the site and host it in the cloud. Also, the cloud provides what our campus never could attain with self-hosting, most of which was redundancy and scalability. It also required the attention of an IT staff member. Now, I can reassign staff to other projects on campus.
Do you have code developers that work for your college that help you customize Moodlerooms?
RM: "We don't have any code developers on site. Any customization done to our sites is completed through a statement of work with Moodlerooms."
We have our own IT staff that is hosting Blackboard here at our University. What are the advantages of having it hosted to hosting it yourself? We would like to host it ourselves.
RM: "Redundancy and scalability are probably the biggest advantages. Pricing is also very reasonable. When we were with ANGEL, as our distance learning programs grew, had to add more server nodes as well as a load balancer.
What did you use for the online training?
RM: We used Moodle to train our faculty. Basically, any faculty that would have an instructional presence online were required to go through training. Existing faculty went through two week online training to use to tools Moodlerooms provides. We had three instructional designers teaching groups of 20 faculty in a series of 2-week, fully all online classes until all 240 campus faculty were trained. This strategy was based on Moodlerooms' Train-the-Trainer' model.
What did you use to convert courses? Can you give an estimate of how much time per course is necessary to migrate?
RM: "We used Moodlerooms' ANGEL version 7.3 course converter to convert our courses. The conversion tool takes between 15-20 minutes to package a course. Once the content was converted, faculty typically conducted their own review process to update or edit the content to keep things fresh."
Did you use Datatel to produce transcripts? What if a school has another system?
RM: "We use Datatel to produce transcripts. Use the learning management system for content delivery, The official student record is all Datatel SIS-based. That's where administrators and staff go to get transcripts. If a school can't produce transcripts from their SIS, there should be other options for doing so."
How much of an interruption did you experience during the migration (how much downtime was there in your distance learning programs)? Did you put your online offerings on hold or did you run parallel systems?
RM: Didn't lose anytime at all. This current Spring 2011 semester is still primarily running on ANGEL with a few courses in Moodlerooms joule. Our Summer term will be run on Moodlerooms. For spring term, there are 350 total courses and only 10 of those will be run in Moodlerooms joule. The rest will be run on ANGEL. The 10 courses in joule are in a program-specific where students won't be forced to navigate or log into two different systems. We tried to do this to eliminate confusion.
How satisfied are you with Moodlerooms in terms of their hosting services? Have you had any complains or issues?
RM: At this point and time, we've been very satisfied and things have definitely improved as we've gone along. Communication is very transparent and notifications are coming quicker. You can really tell that Moodlerooms is growing into one of the most established providers.
Are you able to automate the course copy function, copying courses from one term to another based on faculty requests?
RM: "I'm not sure if there's an automation feature. We haven't had an issue with manually copying the master course into the faculty's term course shell. We also have access to a provisioning area where faculty can easily store and manage their course content."
What, if any, complaints have faculty had with Moodle? What have they liked the most about it?
RM: "We've been through quite a few migrations, and we've discovered that you're going to have mild resistance to any new LMS at first. There's just enough difference from any one system to another and that's going to require faculty training. However, once faculty overcomes the learning curve, they grow comfortable with the new system. We're finding that faculty likes Moodlerooms a lot."
When compared with Blackboard or other LMS, what kind of system issues have faculty and Moodle Admin experienced?
RM: "Our administrator for Moodlerooms typically fields more exceptions and on quality assurance instead of maintaining the system. However, of the few issues we've had, faculty seem to have issues with late registrants to classes and getting them properly enrolled."
Would you talk about the decision-making process? Who was involved? time frame, etc?
RM: "We have an online advisory group that meets quarterly. It's made up of 20 faculty and that help evaluate software. To help with the review process, our VP of Administrative Services, VP of Instruction, and VP of IT attended each advisory meeting. One the advisory group and campus VPs made finished the evaluation, we made the recommendation to the college's President.
I have a question about student evaluation of faculty in online courses. Here in Maryland, we're seeing efforts to codify legal requirements for institutions to prove that such evaluation is taking place. Are you finding it easier (or even possible) to get this done with tools available in joule?
RM: " joule includes a survey tool, but we typically provide students with a link that takes them to a separate database processor where they can fill out the evaluations."
Did you use a consultant during the migration process?
RM: "No"
There are several providers similar to Moodlerooms, why Moodlerooms over the other available vendors?
RM: "For us, it all goes back to the partnership with Datatel. Moodlerooms' partnership with Datatel was what really did it for us."
Do you use open source alternatives to Elluminate and TurnitIn?
RM: "No."
Do you have further questions? If so, check out the case studies of our webinar participants, or feel free to submit them in the comments below. Also, stay tuned until tomorrow when we provide responses to questions by our second webinar presenter, Steve Beining, Instructional Designer and Distance Learning Department Chair for Clackamas Community College in Oregon.
As always, thanks for reading
Monday, March 21, 2011
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