On Monday, we provided responses to some of the questions that were sent in from attendees of our most recent webinar, "CHANGE: Migrating from a Legacy LMS to an Open-Source Moodle Platform," held on March 10th. The webinar focused specifically on the topic of SIS/ERP integration with a new LMS solution. We highlighted two unique Moodlerooms customers that recently made the transition to joule to implement a more 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.
On Monday, we focused on responses from webinar presenter, Robert Morgan, Campus Director of the Beatrice Campus and the Dean of Virtual Learning for Southeast Community College in Nebraska. Today, we're featuring responses from our second presenter, Steve Beining, Instructional Designer and Distance Learning Department Chair for Clackamas Community College in Oregon.
Stay tuned tomorrow for answers to the remaining questions.
Looking for more information? Have further questions? If so, check out the case studies of our webinar participants, or feel free to submit them in the comments below.
As always, thanks for reading
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For Steve, why had you not upgraded to later versions of Blackboard?
Steve Beining (SB): "It was mostly due to the difficulties associated with upgrading, so we waited as long as we could. Blackboard [version] 9 was coming out, but we hadn't upgraded due to cost, training and prior difficulties with upgrades. Historically, legacy upgrades have required a total retooling of everything. The cloud model we have in place now provides automatic, incremental upgrades."
Your previous and current LMS, were they a hosted solution by a company or was it hosted by your college?
SB: "We had managed hosting from Blackboard."
Do you have code developers that work for your college that help you customize Moodlerooms?
SB: "Any enhancements or customizations are [contracted] through 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.
SB: "The positives are access to 24/7 support, disaster recovery, a turnkey solution, and the economies of scale that some colleges can't purchase for themselves, depending on their size. As a campus, we couldn't support anything ourselves that provided the elasticity that comes with the cloud and its ability to cover for an institution's peak times. By hosting through a provider, you allow a company to support those peaks and deliver on commodity. Commodity levels out the peaks of usage and utilization rates and sustains it at base level."
What did you use for the online training?
SB: "We didn't have a formal online training program. Instead, we provided face-to-face training based on a set of skills that we thought were necessary for new users to Moodle to grasp. Collectively, it came to be about six hours of training per person. Now, although face-to-face training is still offered, we've extended the baseline training in a series of videos.
What did you use to convert courses? Can you give an estimate of how much time per course is necessary to migrate?
SB: "We used two different tools to convert courses. We used the "Be Free Tool" as well as LSU's Blackboard to Moodle conversion tools. As far as assessments go, the LSU course converter was a big help. It lets you grab just the Blackboard assessments, package it in a Moodle archive and open it up in a Moodle course."
Did you use Datatel to produce transcripts? What if a school has another system?
SB: "Yes."
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?
SB: "Our online programs have kept going during the migration. As far as momentary downtime or system outages, it was no more than an hour here or there. We ran the Blackboard parallel with the Moodlerooms pilot. Most were still using Blackboard. When we switched during Summer 2010, Moodlerooms became the main system. In my experience, when colleges do a migration, they typically pilot for a year before they phase down the use of the old system and phase up the use of another. Also, considering our institution wanted to implement the Datatel integration piece, it didn't make sense to run a system in parallel. It was about divisiveness. It would be far more work to manage systems in equal use. We wanted to prevent any confusion about what the primary system was and cut over quickly."
Is your portal the Datatel "Active Portal" ?
SB: "Yes."
How satisfied are you with Moodlerooms in terms of their hosting services? Have you had any complains or issues?
SB: "We've had some downtime when we first started using them. Then again, when we were on Blackboard's managed hosting model, we never went a month without at least some downtime."
Are you able to automate the course copy function, copying courses from one term to another based on faculty requests?
SB: "Courses are provisioned so that faculty can manage their own content. Course copying can be initiated in Moodle. Although the copies can't be automated, it enables faculty to review and manage their own courses and content each semester. We've created a staging area for faculty take content from provisioned courses and let them save it. They can then provision a shell and copy content from staging area into shell and vice-versa."
What, if any, complaints have faculty had with Moodle? What have they liked the most about it?
SB: "There were concerns about the new design space. Also, some faculty found the gradebook was problematic, but I personally had difficulties with the Blackboard gradebook as well. The quiz and question tools also took some adjusting. Ultimately, it's a change to a new system and the comfort level is going to differ. I personally liked the simplicity in which students got started and moved through a course. In general, Moodle's instructional design less convoluted and required fewer explanations. Most [faculty] likes the freedom that Moodle gives them. Blackboard 6.3 was a more constrained environment. Moodle's themes and flexible layouts are well received. Online courses should have personality and Blackboard didn't allow much deviation from a standard format."
Would you talk about the decision-making process? Who was involved? time frame, etc?
SB: "Myself and a 12-member faculty senate were involved. It took about 10 months from the first discussion for the senate to make a decision."
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?
SB: " We're not using it, but it's possible to do this with joule's survey tool. We conduct assessments using a third party outside of Moodle, but those same surveys can be created within joule and administrators can collect results."
Did you use a consultant during the migration process?
SB: "No"
There are several providers similar to Moodlerooms, why Moodlerooms over the other available vendors?
SB: "The prices favorable from other vendors, but they didn't have the partnership with Datatel. Plus, the enhancements of the joule platform were nice. We wouldn't have gotten those from other companies."
Steve, do you archive Moodle courses? How does that work?
SB: "Yes, we do. There are backup tools in every Moodle course. Backups are saved in root drive in SFTP. We are able to save those archives at will. We typically save each course at every term and put them in an archive."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, March 28, 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment