Minutes 11/28/06
James, Susan, Linda, Helen and several members of OET joined the discussion today.
Discussion of what to share with Faculty to inform them of our process.
People will email James with their ideas. The general consensus was that the message should be delivered at the faculty meeting and in writing either through email or inside news.
Discussion of Moodle Experimentation.
Susan lead the discussion from http://demo.moodle.org we decided that we would post our thoughts on Moodle and this discussion as comments to this post.
Comments
My overall impressions of Moodle:
1. I think the teacher interface is busy and a bit intimidating. But most faculty will get over it eventually. I'm just not looking forward to showing it to them the first time.
2. Given the modular nature of Moodle it's difficult to judge what an out-of-the-box installation will look and work like from the online demos. The fact that many things didn't work properly at one site lead me to believe that there will be a significant amount of set-up involved to get it the way we want. We won't really know until we try to install it someplace.
3. It doesn't seem possible to import webct courses, and importing quiz questions will not be straightforward. In many cases it may be easier to just re-enter them.
4. The calendar feature is disappointing. Didn't see a way to import/export entries.
5. The large number of options availabe is both good and bad. Good because it looks like it can do a lot, bad because too many choices can be confusing. Overall I think good wins - eventually we'll figure out which options we want and probably ignore the rest.
6. Has LaTeX integration instead of Equation Editor. Faculty already familiar with LaTeX (math, CS, some physics, chem) will like this. Those who use equation editor but don't know LaTeX may not be so happy.
Bottom line: I think we could live with Moodle if we had to, but I'm hoping we'll see something better in the next few weeks.
Posted by: Susan | November 29, 2006 8:29 AM
At this point, I agree with Susan's bottom line as I would echo many of her 6 points. I would add the following:
1. That the teacher has incredible control over the course settings like enrollment, upload size, theme, etc.
2. The quiz tool contains similar features to the ones our faculty are known to use. The import of WebCT quizzes was not straight forward as I hoped.
3. Changing the format of the course from topics or weekly to social the options for tools other than discussion are hard to add. The only way I could figure it out was to add tools when the course was in a different format and then change to social.
I posted some follow up things I found at my blog (http://webpub.allegheny.edu/employee/j/jfadden/wordpress/?p=309)
Posted by: James Fadden | November 29, 2006 2:16 PM