Answering Your Questions from the Webinar: The Case for Personalized Learning

On Tuesday, June 7, Moodlerooms sponsored a webinar entitled "Changing Demographics in Higher Education: The Case for Personalized Learning." Moodlerooms' own VP of Product Strategy, Phill Miller, discussed a few of the emerging trends in e-Learning and how today's education technologies must adapt to meet the requirements of students and instructors within today's colleges and universities. The webinar also featured Robert Johnson, Executive Director of LCTCSOnline (the full-online component of the Louisiana Community and Technical College System), who provided an institutional perspective to the emerging e-Learning trends. In case you didn't catch the webinar, you can view a recording of it on-demand, here.

One of Phill's main focuses within the webinar was how joule 2, Moodlerooms' enterprise e-Learning platform based on Moodle 2, enables professors to personalize learning to scale to better serve the growing and increasingly diverse student population. If you didn't catch our recent post about joule 2's Personalized Learning Designer, check it out, here.

Unfortunately, we weren't able to answer all of the questions submitted from the audience during the webcast, so we've provided those answers below.

Q: Do you have a matrix showing what is in core Moodle 2.0 and what are Moodlerooms/joule add-ons?

• For information on joule's additional features, check out our joule 2 product download, here.

• In addition, take a look at Moodlerooms' comprehensive comparison matrix for detailed information on Moodlerooms' enhancements, here.
  

Q: Does Moodlerooms support the use of plug-ins like Wimba?

• Moodlerooms supports a diverse array of synchronous communication tools (such as Wimba) and other plug-ins that expand the capabilities of joule and Power, Moodlerooms' enterprise Moodle platforms.
  

Q: How do you ensure authenticity of the quiz taker in distance learning classes? Are you using special technology to validate (e.g., digital imprints)?

• Quizzes have several security options to help secure assessments. Moodlerooms supports more than 15 methods of authentication against external sources, and quizzes can be shown in a "secure" window, which restricts some of the things that students can do with their browsers.

Q: What's to deter a school from downloading and installing Moodle 2 on their own instead of using Moodlerooms?

• Moodlerooms provides enterprise-hosted and fully-supported platforms based on Moodle. Moodlerooms knows that some institutions are fully capable (and would prefer) to manage Moodle themselves. However, true to its nature as open-source software, even Moodle 2 requires a particular expertise and an investment in personnel and resources to effectively implement, deploy and sustain on a large scale. That's where we come in.
  

Q: Does joule have a built-in safe exam browser?

• Based on Moodle, joule has a series of features that secure students during online assessments. For more information, contact feedback@moodlerooms.com.
  

Q: How do you handle 508 accessibility at Moodlerooms?

• Moodle is the only open-source learning management system that is fully Section 508 compliant, and Moodlerooms works with California State University's compliance office to ensure Moodle remains that way. However, course creators must be careful to take proper precautions and use tools correctly, because even though Moodle itself is accessible, courses and imported content might not be. Because Moodle is able to re-use content created by external authoring tools, an institution can stay well-within accessibility guidelines by generating qualified Web accessible content in an authoring tool and then rendering it within Moodle.