The Moodle Dilemma: To Vendor-Host or Self Host

"To vendor-host or self-host?"

It's a pivotal question that any CIO or academic technology decision maker must ask when choosing to implement Moodle or a Moodle-based e Learning platform within a college campus. Moodlerooms North East Sales Director, Kurt Beer, had the opportunity to present on this subject last week. Here is his recap:

On June 8, I had the opportunity to contribute to an informative presentation when I attended the 7th Annual Massachusetts Colleges Online (MCO) Conference on E-Learning at Mount Wachusett Community College in Gardner Massachusetts. On behalf of Moodlerooms, I presented the decision variables associated with vendor-hosting Moodle while Jenene Cook, Dean of Academic Technology for Roxbury Community College, presented the decision variables associated with designing a custom in-house Moodle hosting model.



Jenene Cook, Dean of Academic Technology, Roxbury Community College (left)
and Kurt Beer, Director of North East Sales, Moodlerooms (right)


Here are a few of the decision variables we explored:

• Expertise: Does your institution possess enough experience to implement a Moodle solution campus-wide?
• Change Management: If migrating from a previous LMS, does your staff have the ability or resources to convert existing courses and templates to Moodle?
• Technical Support: Does your institution possess the experienced staff? Have you organized an effective support structure to help users troubleshoot their way through the system?
• Data Privacy/Security: Can you ensure your users' safety while using the LMS in their day-to-day studies?
• Functionality Enhancements: Is there a system in place to test and implement new features and learning tool integrations?
• Cost: Will the benefits outweigh the costs to your institution?

Jenene and I felt that the presentation was a great success and we're thinking of presenting again next year.

In order to deliver more varied content next year, what other decision variables should Jenene and I explore? Tell us in the comments below.

On The Open Road Like Jack, Willie and Matt

One of the most rewarding aspects of working in the Ed-Tech world is having the opportunity to hear from real educators who are teaching in a new age and have a lot of factors to evaluate when bringing technology into the classroom. Inspired by three of my favorites, Willie Nelson, Jack Kerouac and Matt Asay, I am hitting the road to share ed-tech stories from practitioners around the country.

Prompted by many different reasons, Willie, Jack and Matt have all hit the road at one point in time. Their stories have captivated and motivated many, and while all three have the spirit of discovery in common, they have chosen different mediums to capture the thrill of what comes next.



Beatnik writer Jack Kerouac penned The Open Road, which is often hailed and reviled as one of the greatest American novels of all time. The book is an open narrative that tackled the controversial themes and characters of an era while chronicling many spontaneous road trips that spanned the continental US.











Nicknamed "The Red-Headed Stranger," singer-songwriter Willie Nelson was compelled to write the hit song "On The Road Again" for the movie Honeysuckle Rose. This song is as much a part of American Music as any other and has made Willie famous for writing it.









Matt Asay, COO of Canonical and writer of “The Open Road” blog, has made the business and politics of open source a daily discussion. His blog is a poke in the eye to zealots and a wakeup call to entrenched proprietary software vendors. Through his work and writing, he has helped to raise the awareness of open-source software.

Over the past two and a half years I have been behind the marketing desk at Moodlerooms. Now, I have stepped into the K-12 Ed-Tech world. Earlier this June, I traveled to Harrodsburg, KY, to present on the many ways that managed open-source Moodle can help teachers and engage students in the Mercer County School District.

At the end of June, I'll be hitting the road again and heading to Denver, CO, for the ISTE Annual Conference and Exhibition. ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) provides a forum to demonstrate how education leaders can achieve their goal of enhancing student learning through technology.

Since it's my first post, I wanted pose the following question:

If you could do anything with learning management what would it be?

This blog will provide responses to that question and deliver some insight that I hope to gain as I'm out on the open road.

Until next time, here is a tune you won't stop humming:
On The Road Again - Willie Nelson

joule How-To: Course Menu Block

Below, we've highlighted joule's course menu navigational block that allows for a clean Moodle course design. As Tom states in the video, it's an amalgam of different menu blocks, including:

• Calendar block
• Gradebook block
• Assignments
  
• Messages
• Resources
• Forums
  

It's a dynamic list that grows when instructors add content to a course.

Enjoy!

Moodle 2.0 Preview Series

Anticipation surrounding the release of Moodle 2.0 has been building for quite a while. Understandably so, considering it's the biggest rewrite of Moodle to date. We thought it'd be helpful to sift through a lot of the info surrounding the new features, provide some highlights and describe how the upgrades make teaching and learning more effective and engaging for instructors and students alike.

I wanted to share a blog created by a Moodle community member that does a good job of highlighting a few of the most important features that are new to Moodle 2.0.

Here are some of the most notable new features:

• Private File Block: Users can now manage their own private file space.
• Navigation Block: The new course menu block makes in-course navigation and site-wide navigation around a course of 10 or more topics much simpler.
  
• Repositories: Users can now easily bring content into Moodle from external repositories and connect to Web systems like Flickr, Mahara, Box.net, Alfresco, GoogleApps and others.
  
• Conditional Activities: Learning paths (with the goal of self-certification) can be better carved based on completion of tasks such as quizzes and assessments and by accessing particular resources.
  
• Portfolio Export: This new e-portfolio feature gives users the ability to retrieve and store their work from Moodle. The new API provides a set of interfaces that allow users easily publish files to external repositories such as Mahara, Flickr and GoogleDocs or even download them to their personal desktops.

I also wanted to share this Moodle 2.0 preview video. At just over eight minutes, it gives a very comprehensive feature overview.

I'm curious to hear what everyone else thinks so far. So tell me, which Moodle 2.0 feature are you most excited about?

joule How-To: Notifications

Moodleroom's enterprise e-Learning solution, joule, is Moodle + enhanced features and services.

With this series, we wanted to being highlighting features or capabilities particular to the joule learning management platform by providing an explanation of how the feature is used in the context of teaching and learning in addition to a video tutorial that provides a step-by-step instructions to using the feature.

We figured a good place to start was the notifications feature, which gives instructors the ability to communicate with a variety of recipients to promote successful learning behaviors. Instructors can set notification types and create templates to automatically contact individuals or groups with announcements, feedback and alerts based on student performance or activity.

joule’s notifications system lets instructors intervene earlier to offer remedial activities and guide struggling students to success.

Check it out here:

Learning Impact 2010 and the New LMS

Moodlerooms Board Member, Lou Pugliese, wanted to provide some commentary after participating on a panel at the IMS GLC's recent Learning Impact 2010 Conference:

A few weeks ago, I participated in a panel discussion entitled, "From Course Management to Digital Support for Learning Platforms," at the IMS Global Learning Consortium's yearly conference, Learning Impact.

Panel moderator, Rob Abel, IMS GLC's Chief Executive, prepared the panelists with a series of questions to contemplate in advance of the session. The responses to these questions, in my opinion, illuminate the current state of online learning and supporting learning management systems and an impending forecast how the industry is evolving.

For the next few weeks, I'll be sharing a few observations on the past and future of the LMS, which were stimulated by Abel’s questions.

Online Learning continues to be an immature market: in the approximate 400 year history of higher education, online learning has been one of the fastest-adopted technologies (save perhaps the cell phone and fax machine. Although the traditional LMS may have a 95% adoption rate, its short-life span presumes a number of ways to evolve towards different kinds of learning networks and environments. Casey Green, Campus Computing Project Director, posits that the “campus LMS market is a mature market with immature products.”

To his point, the early LMS was designed with relatively little research base and, as such, defaulted to a didactic, teacher-centric focus…not student-centric participatory tool. Additionally, learning management is still burdened by the fact that it is an administrative and utilitarian-based creation, lacking significant instructional and cognitive design.

It’s clear that “New LMS” will need to rely on a more cogent research base. In 1998, Martin Dougiamas (the author of Moodle) explored a vision of social constructivism in online teaching with his notion that,

“The social world of a learner includes the people that directly affect that person, including teachers, friends, students, administrators, and participants in all forms of activity. This takes into account the social nature of both the local processes in collaborative learning and in the discussion of wider social collaboration in a given subject, such as science.” (A Journey into Constructivism Martin Dougiamas - November, 1998)

His release of Moodle in August 2002, is one of the best examples of designing global educational software with deep collaboration from instructors, and with over 32 million educator adoptions, I think the marketplace is beginning to vote in favor of this approach.

So what will this look like? At this juncture, no one really knows for sure but in speaking with academicians around the country, it’s clear to me that New LMS will need to be designed from the demand side of the supply and demand equation, not vice versa. Designing to the “consumer” will clearly place greater emphasis on student experience and LMS as a student-centered application that gives students greater control over content and learning.

How will we know all of this will have an impact? Movement toward a competency based LMS design for the online teaching and learning I believe will be accretive to the type of gains in online education we’re seeking.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks as more thoughts begin to unfold.

Webinar Series: The Perfect Fit in e-Learning

When we were creating content for our most recent webinar (the first of four), we knew we would be addressing a few highly technical software and IT strategies (cloud computing, managed open-source and Software-as-a-Service) within a short time frame.

In the interest of keeping technical explanations as succinct and accessible as possible, we asked ourselves, "When used in conjunction with one another, what do cloud computing, managed open source and Software-as-a-Service as practices actually allow us to do?”

Despite a wide range of benefits and advantages, we realized that our unique approach to e learning delivered one over-arching quality:

"Fit."

Why should you have to purchase something you aren't going to use? We want to provide a learning platform that gives organizations of any complexity the opportunity to shape a solution that perfectly fits them.

We do this by offering flexibility in every aspect of the learning management platform:

• Cloud Computing: Through our partner Dell, Moodlerooms can provide on-demand server scalability to handle growth, fluctuations and peak usage periods. This means organizations can use as much or as little space and resources as they need at any particular time.

• Managed Open Source: Moodlerooms tests and certifies code before incorporating it into our learning platform, which features the open-source LMS Moodle at the core. The modular, component-based e-learning software gives organizations the opportunity to pick and choose the features that they want and need.

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): SaaS is essentially the manner in which managed software is delivered. Moodlerooms provides security, technical assistance, hosting, training and many other services to support our learning platform. Organizations can select any set of these services to make their e Learning experience as effective and hassle free as possible.

During the webinar Q&A period, many of the attendees wanted us to identify the differences between the three components of our approach. We will be breaking-down each part of it over the next few weeks in a blog series that will provide background information on the topics explored in our four-part webinar series.

What we hope to achieve, more than just delivering information about our offerings, is to provide context. Basically, in the grand scheme of teaching and learning:

• What are the merits of an e Learning approach?

• How does an e Learning solution help instructors and students?

• How can an e Learning solution grow and shift to meet evolving needs of an organization?

 We hope to answer these questions with this blog series -- not just in regard to Moodlerooms, but in the education sphere as a whole.

Welcome to the Moodlerooms Blog!

When educators Tom Murdock, Gina Russell-Stevens and Sheila Gatling founded Moodlerooms in 2005, they aspired to make teaching and learning technology more effective, affordable and fun for everyone with the help of the open-source learning management system, Moodle.

Five years later, Moodlerooms has expanded to nearly forty employees to provide learning management solutions to over 700 clients. With open-source Moodle still at the core of our offerings, we provide enhanced features with joule, our enterprise learning management platform and tested plug-ins with our mPower Program. We've also built a set of reliable support services and partnered with Dell, Inc. to deliver trusted and verified hosting solutions.

Needless to say, a lot has changed in a very short period of time. When things get a bit crazy around the Moodlerooms offices (more often than not, they do), it helps to step back and realize that we're still working toward exactly what Tom, Gina and Sheila set out to do.

So in the spirit of growth and change, it seems fitting that we start this blog to provide you with:

• Moodle, LMS and other education news insights
• A glimpse of the people and technology behind Moodlerooms
• Event recaps
  
• Moodlerooms success stories
• Feature updates and integrations
  

One of the most exciting things about working at Moodlerooms is seeing how all of our collaboration and creative ideas shape the technology that is a part of students' and instructors' daily lives.

We're anxious to get your feedback as well. Feel free to drop us a line at feedback@moodlerooms.com.

So once again, welcome!

Stay tuned.