Moodling
Moodle is Open Source software, meaning that it is free to use and to modify. It was developed by a former WebCT system admin, while working on a PhD in education. The name was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. The philosophy of social constructivism underlies the software.
Moodle is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database (other databases can be used, but MySQL seems to be the prefered one.) The M in Moodle (Modular) seems to very much apply. All kinds of people have written and contributed all sorts of modules. Ask me later why I think this is not necessarily a good thing.
Moodle features seem to include all of the usual suspects: quizzes, grades, discussions, wiki, etc. Email is notably missing. The module thing confuses the issue somewhat - if it's not a core feature of Moodle there may be a module out there somewhere that adds the feature.
With a large user base, development of Moodle has been (and continues to be) rapid. Many of the resources and comparisons I found online are a year or two old so are likely to be outdated. They can still be used to help determine that some features exist in Moodle, though shouldn't be taken at face value for features that are missing or inadequate.
I tried to get a sense of whether WebCT courses could be imported into Moodle when doing my research. I found some indication that parts could be imported. One site indicated that WebCT quiz questions could be imported directly. I also found one college with a form that faculty filled out to request a course conversion and one company that did course conversions for a fee. From this, I take it that a certain amount of hands-on work is going to be needed to convert a WebCT course into a Moodle course. James has already talked about the possibility of using student help over the summer to do this.
Commercial hosting of Moodle is available, as is paid support. Moodle.com lists companies around the world who do this. In addition, there are online user forums on the moodle.org site which one can turn to for free peer support.
Moodle seems to be able to use LDAP for authentication and for course enrollment. This will need closer investigation if Moodle becomes a serious contender.
Some of the sites I found that can be of interest to our investigation are:
- For kicking the tires, these sites give you full access to Moodle (as teacher, admin or student). Sites are rebuilt every hour or two: Opensourcecms.com demo site, moodle.org demo site
- Moodle Documentation
- A quite thorough - though 2 year old - report on the features of Moodle
- A report on some of the differences between WebCT and Moodle
- Moodle System Requirements (these were actually fairly hard to find)