Thursday, November 3, 2011

The Moodle Top 10 Webinar: Answering Your Questions



It wasn't exactly the kind of "Top Ten" that you'd expect to see on the Late Show with David Letterman...

Nonetheless, yesterday's Moodle "Top 10" webinar was relevant to anyone using an LMS in higher education. Presented by Campus Technology Magazine and featuring Marsha Beal, director of digital learning and instructional technology for the Andrews University; and Kurt Sussman, director of educational technology for Keystone College, the webinar explored the top ten benefits that each campus experienced after transitioning to an enterprise, fully- supported Moodle platform.

If you didn't get a chance to attend the live webinar, you can view it on-demand, here.

Below, we've provided answers to just a few of the audience questions. Next week, we'll be providing more answers to your questions for presenters Marsha Beal and Kurt Sussman, so stay tuned! If you have other questions after viewing the webinar on-demand, feel free to email them to feedback@moodlerooms.com.

Q: What learning management systems did each of these case study universities use prior to Moodle?
Were both Kurt and Marsha self-hosted with their old solutions and did they ?
  • Keystone College (Kurt) was using a self-hosted instance of Blackboard and Andrews University (Marsha) was using a hosted version of Desire2Learn. Moodlerooms now hosts the Moodle instances of each respective institution in its cloud infrastructure.

Q: Are Andrews University or Keystone College using the mobile app? What platform is the app available?

  • Andrews University and Keystone College aren't currently using any Mobile applications to connect to Moodle. However, Moodlerooms does offer one that connects to its enterprise platform, joule. It's available for the iPhone, Blackberry and Android mobile platforms. For more information, visit the Moodlerooms joule mobile page.

Q: Could a university use Moodle through Moodlerooms to deliver over 500 courses online?
  • With Moodlerooms, institutions can seamlessly deploy as many online courses as required to as many users as needed. Moodlerooms provides a secure, high availability environment in the cloud that can scale to accommodate peak and non-peak periods of use. Check out our page on cloud hosting for more information.

Q: Marsha and Kurt talked about migration services. Does Moodlerooms migrate courses in batch process or is it all-in-one?
  • Moodlerooms can migrate an institution's courses from their current LMS to Moodle using either batch or all-in-one processes, or even a combination of the two. For more information about Moodlerooms' migration services, visit our course conversion page.

Q: What are you using for synchronous tools to create live online classrooms?

  • While Andrews University isn't currently using a synchronous collaboration tool, Keystone College is using joule synchronous, a version of Adobe Connect that has been specially integrated with the joule platform. For more information on this tool, visit here.

Q: The support that was discussed at length, is that for the Moodle administrators or is it open to your entire campus community? Is this phone support? Other modes?
  • Andrews University and Keystone College currently access administrator support by logging into Moodlerooms' enterprise support portal or by phone. This administrator support is provided to all Moodlerooms accounts. Moodlerooms can also provide access to end-user is required. For more information on support services, visit here.

Q: What version of Moodle are these colleges using?
  • Andrews University and Keystone College are currently using platforms based on Moodle 1.9, but both have plans to transition to Moodle 2 in the near future. For more information on joule 2, Moodlerooms enterprise platform that is based on Moodle 2, visit here.

Thanks for reading,


- Brad

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