VLEs

[Norphy]

Just a quick straw poll really

 

The school is looking into VLEs and MLEs. I'm being pushed every which way but loose into finding solutions and I've been pricing up the Microsoft one today (£30000! Wow!)

 

We've had pitches from Digital Brain (£4000 pa at least) and Capita (£7000 pa) and are going to get salesmen from RM pitching Kaliedos (I've already made my thoughts known on that one ) and a company who will do us a Moodle solution soon (e4education probably).

 

I'm wondering what people use and how they're find it.

 

Cheers,

 

Norphy

[tarquel]

Dont think we are using one [didnt see that option so chosen Other ]

 

Cheers

Nath

[webman]

I've always wanted to use Moodle as our VLE but people at the top who listen to sales spiel want to go with something that will cost lots of money and provide little functionality. The latest is Frog Teacher; but their website was down for about 5 hours yesterday

 

The school is/was also looking at Kaleidos, "because it integrates with SIMS" And some Microsoft thing "because it all integrates".

 

I'll not complete the poll yet as we could end up using anything

 

Yes, that's right.. they changed my role to VLE manager 4 months ago yet we still don't have one. Figure that one out if you can :x

[Geoff]

Homebrewed Moodle on LAMP. Setup with internet access via the CLEO reverse proxy. Not live yet, we're in the process of getting the data moved from our previous moodle system (hosted by CLEO).

 

Total cost: about 6 hours of my time and £900 of Dell server hardware.

[Guest richard]

At the moment we are using nothing and as far as I know there are no plans but then as they don't bother to tell me anything how knows:?

[Norphy]

Dont think we are using one [didnt see that option so chosen Other ]

 

Cheers

Nath

 

Heh, didn't occur to me to put that. According to my boss every school in the country is going to have something implemented by 2008 :|

[GrumbleDook]

Presently Using FirstClass version 8 ... have also got a moodle setup as well (in development) but also looking at learning gateway for certain things.

 

Previously using Bodington too ... nice but a bit clunky to administer.

 

Depending on pricing we may go for the new add-on for FirstClass ... surprisingly called FirstClass ED ... makes the administration of if a whole heap easier ... but costs that little bit more.

[alan-d]

Ours is a simple Portal setup giving access to shared areas and home directories plus a couple of other utilities.

 

SMT seem happy with that for now so plans for a moodle type setup have been shelved for the time being.

 

I looked at e4educations moodle solution, by setting it up yourself, you could save a packet.

[Norphy]

I know that but its not just about money, its about the time needed to implement the thing well, the design skills to make it look good and quite frankly the expertise. I'm a perfectly competant network administrator but my web design skills aren't all that.

[Geoff]

While we've been using Moodle here I found once you have the basic theme sorted (cue art department...) its content thats important. While the technical side of setting the thing didn't take long, training all the teachers so they were comfortable actually using it (and thus generating that all important content) took many man-days. We still haven't finished this process.

[tarquel]

Dont think we are using one [didnt see that option so chosen Other ]

 

Cheers

Nath

 

Heh, didn't occur to me to put that. According to my boss every school in the country is going to have something implemented by 2008 :|

 

Is country meaning England or UK tho?

 

I dont get paid enough to worry about it tho lol so i wont hehe

 

All good fun init?

 

[made this post about 2-3 hrs ago but got called away as per usual hehe]

 

Nath

[Norphy]

UK from what I understand but most likely every school in England and Wales. It was just a comment in passing so I don't know much about it.

[tarquel]

gotcha *thumbs up*

 

Nath

[GrumbleDook]

It is meant to be every school connected to the National Education Network should have the facilities to access a virtual learning environment and a portfolio storage area for each student.

 

Some of this is being delivered by RBCs, and some by either individual schools or consortia of schools.

 

There is information on the Becta website about this ... somewhere ... you'd have to use google to find it ;-)

[u8dmtm]

We use iPupil - a homegrown solution. It is always available, flexible enough to do what teachers actually want it to do and cuts out the useless - as well as being fully integrated with user accounts (i.e. no additional logon). We started well ahead of the game in our area but because its home grown our VLE has kept pace with the market without the cost of commericial stuff

[petectid]

I've always wanted to use Moodle as our VLE but people at the top who listen to sales spiel want to go with something that will cost lots of money and provide little functionality. The latest is Frog Teacher; but their website was down for about 5 hours yesterday

 

The school is/was also looking at Kaleidos, "because it integrates with SIMS" And some Microsoft thing "because it all integrates".

 

I'll not complete the poll yet as we could end up using anything

 

Yes, that's right.. they changed my role to VLE manager 4 months ago yet we still don't have one. Figure that one out if you can :x

 

We have a frog box here and I'm having some serious reservations about its security. Try doing some google searches and you will find a few pages which sit behind a secure login? That have been indexed by google, I have even been able to browse the database entrys for users and groups. All sorts of information which would aid a brute force attack of the server.

[Disease]

Jake and I have a Moodle server set up at the moment although today I was seriously looking at Sharepoint Server. I have setup Sharepoint on another server to compare them both side by side.

 

At the moment we are under severe pressure and threats from our LEA saying that we will be non compliant and that we will alienate ourselves if we do not go with their solution, theirs is Netmedia's MyDesktop which is a pile of crap far too confusing for the layman to navigate and they are estimating will cost us 3k a year.

 

At the last meeting with the Head of ICT for Portsmouth LEA I told him we were going down the Moodle route, he has taken that back to his Head of Education for Portsmouth LEA who has subsequently started sending scare mongering emails direct to the Head to try and scare her into going with their solution.

 

My reasoning for their actions is that they HAVE to provide a VLE system regardless to any school actually paying into it and they are scared that they will lose money on it.

 

The email read along these lines, "Solutions such as Moodle will most likely not be compliant with educational requirements and therefore will cost the school thousands of pounds in additional expense when you have to move to a compliant service. It does not support single logon (load of crap as Shibboleth do a Moodle add-on) and therefore will not be compliant."

 

At the meeting the other day they were going on about single logon and I said to so you are going to integrate your VLE with our Active Directory logon account? No they will get a new password. So it's not really a single logon then? Yes because... losers they are.

[Geoff]

You might want to mention that Lancs LEA is a 100% moodle solution.

[GrumbleDook]

And you might want to send those emails onto the VLE team at Becta ... Moodle is about as compliant as you get.

[Ric_]

As I mentioned in another topic, from what I can see it's the Becta Learning Framework that it's not compliant with [yet] when it is used with SIMS or CMIS.

 

Moodle fulfils all the requirements of the framework if used with the open source MIS system (whose name escapes me) and the developers are hoping to raise sufficient funds to purchase the SIMS APIs.

 

In the meantime Moodle is a fully featured VLE and, if it does not gain the accreditation by the time it is needed, you can always switch to a different VLE further down the line (having saved thousands in the meantime).

[Geoff]

Do you mean SchoolTool?

 

http://www.schooltool.org/

[GrumbleDook]

@Ric: this was the reason why *no* entry for the e-assessment catagory was shortlisted ... the lack of integration with an MIS was the key failure, and those that did integrate were pants and dropped from the list anyway.

 

The Moodle crew are working on this though and it won't be long before things happen. The main complaint is that online assessments made in the VLE are not easily moved into the MIS for use with the assessment management tools.

 

One solution for this with Moodle is to export the results from any assessments into a csv file that can be imported into Assessment Manager ... not exactly difficult. You could even cron it to go straight fromthe database (which I think is what is being worked on).

[GrumbleDook]

Do you mean SchoolTool?

 

http://www.schooltool.org/

 

The things that worry me about SchoolTool are dealing with PLASC/CENSUS and Exams.

 

One of the few times I am not willing to experiment.

[Sylv3r]

We have actually been paying for DigitalBrain for 3 years which was originally signed up by our ex deputy head. Nothing has been done in the 3 years of having DigitalBrain. It is costing us about 7k a year. I haven't really logged on but have heard a lot of bad things about it I don't even want to get involved with it.

[u8dmtm]

Hasn't anyone noticed that the more you pay for a VLE the worse it tends to be.