VLEs

[thom]

We are part of E2BN (East of England Broadband Network) which gives all schools in the East of England free teacher accounts for NetMedai or DigitalBrain. We prefer DigitalBrain, good e-mail, community, easy to create and share resources. Also if their is a problem they can normally sort it by the end of the day.

 

We bought student accounts and they came in and got all our teachers together to spur them on to use it. They then contact any departments if they are not using it! Saves me a job.

 

We were going to use moodle but since we are tied into this for 3 years now we might as well stick with. It has had good response from teachers and students and is constantly improving.

 

The only problem with the current version is that it's not easy to download all the stuf you created if you want to leave and take it somewhere else. Although this has been promised for the next version (fre upgrade of course.

[Mintsoft]

I'm currently about 75% of the way through setting up moodle on server2. It was mentioned in passing and I thought it'd be better head them off at the pass and get the freeware one implemented before they decide that they "need one". I'd prefer to spend an hour setting up a little bit of php than let them steal money out of our IT budget, because you KNOW thats where they'd take it from.

 

Current Costs: £0 + 2 hours of my time. Seems better than a couple of K for the RM "solution"

[krisd32]

we use a product called uniservity and we're very impressed with it its really functional and easy for the kids and staff to use!

[kallack]

I really can't recommend Moodle highly enough (and now the Open University are going to move all their content to it). Hosted on a local Linux server, it's fast and reliable. We also have SAMBA running on the same server, so teachers can click on a shortcut (on their XP stations) and be presented with a folder that containes the resources their students will see when they log in through the front end. That way teachers don't have to do anything hard like upload content!

 

If you have the expertise, then setting up Moodle on a Linux server is trivial (or impossible if you don't). Although you lose some speed hosting Moodle elsewhere, it is worth it if you do not have the Linux expertise (or don't want to learn how to back up a Linux server. I imagine many companies and some schools (like ours) would be very happy to host a site for you for a fraction of the cost of any of the big players.

 

For infomation, we had Capita's offering and it is dire! Staff and students are so much more enthusiastic about Moodle.

 

The use that it made of a VLE depends MOSTLY on the quality of training given to the staff and their attitude - a whole school issue (my job!), then on the quality of the VLE, but not at all on the hardware or operating system - which is someone elses (our) problem. So long as the hardware is up to the job then all is OK.

 

Our last server was a 1Gb P4 with 1Gb of RAM and an 80 Gb hard drive. It served the internet site, intranet, Moodle, various wikis and was the secure front end to our exchange server so staff could use Outlook Web Access - all without breaking sweat.

 

We only changed it because the disk space was running out - not because it ran out of puff.

 

Cheers

 

Kevin

[Mikey]

Testing Moodle at the moment - I've always been a fan!

But MS Class Server is something I'm looking forward to tinkering with, as the SharePoint solution will work very well at this kind of environment.

[pmassingham]

Just about to incorporate Moodle into a Blue Spheres Web Site. Had a look at Class Server, then Learnwise, but given the comments on both and the costs, we decided that Moodle was the best option, at least to start with.

[kingswood]

I am planning on using Sharepoint, but all this talk of Moodle got me interested. Since I tend to steer clear of IIS and use Apache anyway (even in school for the current test intranet) I decided to install Moodle on an XP machine at home and use the XAMPP control panel to run with the Apache, MySQL and PHP stuff.

 

I am amazed at how easy Moodle is to get up and running. The only problem I did encounter was actually unzipping the Moodle install files. On a P4 3GHz with 1.5GB RAM it was maxing out the processor. So I copied the file to my G5 and unzipped it there and then copied the Moodle folder over-- putting it into the htdocs folder. Fired up the localhost/moodle page and went ahead and ran a basic configuration.

 

Voila!

 

It's actually looking very promising. It's easy to configure courses and users, and the forum component on its own is worth its weight in gold (virtual gold obviously since it's a virtual environment ;-)

 

Gonna have a real test of this *before* I think any further about Sharepoint. Question is- if I download Mandriva Linux 2006 will this install and configure as easily?

 

...I'll let ya know.

 

:-)

[dagza]

Have you seen all of my free courses for Moodle? KS3 ICT and some computing stuff:

 

http://www.e-subjects.co.uk

 

Save you a few months building your own :-) I also have a one for the KS3 tests. Not ready for prime time but I don't mind sharing it among friends. Let me know your email address if anybody out there wants it.

 

I am interested in both comments about sharpoint / class server. I have asked this elsewhere but trying to collect as much information as possible and would be really interested in what you felt moodle was better at and why (and vice verser)

 

Darren

[GrumbleDook]

@Paul: I'm trying to persuade Guy over at LDC to cough up for an instance of Moodle with the EMBC/NeLP SSO that will work between multiple sites ... If you fancy joining in on some joint bits and pieces ...

 

Probably going to use it for the local literacy stuff first but I know Andrew over at CCC is interested ... fancy lending your weight to it too? At the moment the literacy stuff is hosted by Brooke Weston, but Bodington (or pegasus as it has been branded by them) does not have a nice login (unless you have spent a good period rebuild modules).

 

Interested?

[MkII]

Hey Dagza some great courses there. I must've enrolled ages ago coz I have a login and it still works! Your courses are still on our site and quality stuff they are too.

Excited to see you have a teacher induction course - just about to email some of the guys at my place to see what they think. Top stuff!