Is Moodle any less likely to be used than any other VLE?

[witch]

We are looking to implement a VLE in the near future and have been studying Sharepoint, SWGfL's Merlin, Fronter, Frog etc.

My boss is very keen on Moodle, but EVERYONE we have spoken to seems to reckon that the teachers will find Moodle very much more difficult to use and so won't engage with it.

Given that getting users to put stuff on the VLE is the difficult bit - do you think that Moodle is any more difficult to get to grips with than other VLEs? He certainly doesn't think so.

The other argument is that when the Moodle specialist leaves, the school is in trouble - but again, is this any more true of Moodle than any other VLE?

The boss really loves Moodle which was used in his previous school and as far as he is concerned it is the ideal low-cost solution to our requirements.

Could I have your opinions and reasoning behind them please

[CyberNerd]

The other argument is that when the Moodle specialist leaves, the school is in trouble - but again, is this any more true of Moodle than any other VLE?

 

Less so. Moodle is more widely used than any other VLE - there are more moodle specialists and more companies that support moodle. It is also opensource, so has a better support community behind it than other VLE's.

 

Moodle isn't complicated, I find it quite intuitive. Not all of our teachers use it, but the ones that don't probably wouldn't bother to learn anything else either. If oyu don't like the interface, you can always theme it. The biggest criticism of moodle's interface is that there are too many options - it does too much stuff. If you want something basic, with poor integration and few features you could try Uniservity

 

Also consider that you don't have to pay annual license costs with moodle, and the integration with SIMS, Active Directory, homedrives, timetables is getting better all the time.

[Guest monkeyx]

The teachers at our school have no issues with using Moodle. As your title implies some staff are just not interested in using these tools. I found it best to work with the teachers that are interested, which in turn attracted more teachers as they started to look at what other teachers had created.

 

Very few VLEs have as much extendable content and themes.

 

Please have a look at our case study that I wrote at Open Schools Schools.

 

Having an agreed plan for implementig a VLE at a whole school level, is just as important as the VLE itself.

[secretlife]

buy your teachers a copy of this Moodle for teachers book and they'll find it a doddle!

[andykemp]

Having built two sites in moodle over the last 3-4 years I can say that moodle is not the simplest VLE to work with - As CyberNerd points out one of the biggest problems with Moodle is there are too many options and for many users this is a genuine issue... Also the Moodle UI hasn't been AJAX-ified in the same way as some of the comercial product, which means that completing a task (such as linking to a file) can involve loading 3-4 different pages, which makes the process more time consuming...

 

I think the issue of what happens to your moodle install when the moodle enthusiast leaves is a genuine issue though particularly if you are going for an in house selfbuild, as most moodle installs end up being quite bespoke (which is a good thing) but this makes upgrading non-trivial as many of the patches/tweaks/hacks then need to be reapplied... And if the person who did all of these din't document them all thoroughly (and lets be honest most of us don't!) then you can be in quite a lot of difficulty...

 

That shouldn't neccessarily put you off moodle (as it is very powerful and versitile) but it is also worth exploring the other commercial options if the money is avilable to support it...

[witch]

Thanks guys- keep those comments coming!

[Hightower]

I personally thought Moodle was a bit strange to get used to at first, but with a little time spent on it its as easy as frying an egg.

 

Not sure whether that's the same for teachers (the ones who don't like computers), as we use a SharePoint VLE here.

[witch]

Not sure whether that's the same for teachers (the ones who don't like computers), as we use a SharePoint VLE here.

 

Why did you find it strange to use? What was it about it?

 

Did your teachers find Sharepoint difficult to use?

[judyB]

I think the main problem with the moodle interface is the whole uploading files process. This is the first thing most teachers want to do - get existing resources available online. However the interface is non-intuitive and needlessly tedious. This leads them to get discouraged.

 

However this is probably the hardest task - adding forums, glossaries and quizzes is a doddle in comparison, so once they're over that hurdle it gets easier. And the good news is that the file uploading has had a major facelift in Moodle 2.0 (due sometime in June - hopefully!) as well as many other aspects of the interface.

 

i love moodle - but i wouldn't say (in it's current state) it's very easy to use. However it has the advantage of total versatility and customisation - so as long as you have appropriate training and support in place I don't think it's any less likely to be used than another VLE.

[Jamo]

I have to say that compared to other VLE's I found Moodle easy to use and a lot more intuative than certain other VLE's. Also its designed to be a VLE not a glorified web page storage area we are currently having to work around the shortcomings of our VLE here (Fronter) to make it useful, which to me sounds like a completely backwards way of working!!

[Simcfc73]

I'm in the same situation as witch. Currently I have

 

A moodle installed to play with - seems okay and I

A LMS install on Joomla, I love Joomla and reckon I have worked it out pretty well but LMS doesn't do it for me

A sharepoint install which I have tried to get SLK on but failed 4 or 5 times, I like the screenshots of sharepoint LMS v3 but not too keen of sharepoint as a VLE.. don't know why but it seems odd.

Frog demo, its *cries* beautiful and is (almost) plug and play.. I want it so badly

[HodgeHi]

Our school has been looking at VLEs for quite a while now and we in the end decided to go for StudyWiz.

We looked at Moodle but couldn't see an easy way to theme the VLE for use across our Primary School. We have kids aging from Nursery? maybe from reception to Year 6. We wanted something that the young kids could use and didn't look to baby-ish for the year 6. Moodle from our point of view was just too rigid in its look to do anything with. This was one on the reasons we left it. I also found it a little hard to get to grips with the administration process as well although i didn't spend a great deal of time on this side of things as was looking into ways of changing the look and feel.

 

We also looked at Dokeos and also drupaled.

 

Drupaled was looking good, it just wasn't as prgressed as Moodle.

 

We also found an online VLE that you could sign up for free to and use. It looked interesting although i wasn't sure how the LEA would react to use using a platform such as that one.

 

But the reason we went with StudyWiz is that they allowed us to install their software to our local server and then host it there and just pay the costs of the Pupils accessing the VLE. You don't pay for Teachers or parents. This made the costs per annum very reasonable especially for a Primary School's budget.

[CyberNerd]

Drupaled was looking good, it just wasn't as prgressed as Moodle.

 

We use Drupaled alongside moodle. I would not regard drupaled and Moodle as competing - they do very different things. We've themed our moodle and drupaled to look almost identical. Drupaled is used more as an eportfolio and collaborative tool where students create their own groups to share work and ideas. Moodle is a Course management tool. We will probably migrate to Mahara in the future for this purpose, but when we looked at it there were still integration issues with mahara and we have previous experience with drupal.

FWIW I don't think Moodle is as all that well suited to primary, it is much better for high school -> further/ higher education. Some of the features I couldn't see being used in primary.

[witch]

FWIW I don't think Moodle is as all that well suited to primary, it is much better for high school -> further/ higher education. Some of the features I couldn't see being used in primary.

 

The problem with that is, being a middle school, we have 2 primary years (5 and 6) and two senior school years (7 and 8) so any solution has got to cater for both.

I do feel that owing to the fact that the year 5s and 6s are taught as they would be in high school; i.e. they have dedicated subject teachers, does make them a little more able to cope with higher level stuff - I can directly compare as I also work in a junior school which stops at year 6.

Very interested in the comment about uploading files being a bit complex - do others find this and is it true of other VLEs?

[Geoff]

Indeed, a lot of the requests for 'help' I get are in the form of some file manipluation (eg, resize all these jpgs, convert this avi to flv) and/or uploading (upload all the stuff you just converted to course XXX). But it's dead easy if you have SFTP access to the filesystem.

 

If you want a 'teacher proof' method of access to the underlying course files, I'd suggest WebDAV. We've given access to the moodle course files to some of our more 'advanced' users this way.

[CyberNerd]

If you want a 'teacher proof' method of access to the underlying course files, I'd suggest WebDAV. We've given access to the moodle course files to some of our more 'advanced' users this way.

 

I understand that the new moodle 2.0 uses a much more advanced filesystem repository, Ideally we'll be able to upload the entire contents of our shared SMB drives using smb/webdav/sftp.

My understanding is that the repository will make sure there no duplicate files, and it will be possible to select those files and put them into your course.

[Geoff]

I understand that the new moodle 2.0 uses a much more advanced filesystem repository, Ideally we'll be able to upload the entire contents of our shared SMB drives using smb/webdav/sftp.

My understanding is that the repository will make sure there no duplicate files, and it will be possible to select those files and put them into your course.

 

Indeed that's correct.

 

Roadmap - MoodleDocs

 

This will include Mahara and Alfresco DM integration, which greatly interests us.

[witch]

Ok

Now, given that I am a beginner at anything to do with software - I'm a hardware engineer through and through - who can point me at absolutely simple instructions on how to start installing whatever I need (and what DO I need!!) for a moodle site to get up and running

Words of one syllable, please

[SClarke]

Hi,

 

we are currently using Learning NI which is very slow and not the best laid out, but we were considering Moodle, but the against about Moodle was that it has almost too many options and might confuse the staff not comfortable with IT. We did however investigate Studywiz which look very nice, based on Moodle and they host and set it up externally, so less hassle for the school to set-up.

 

Hope this helps,

 

[HodgeHi]

I would look at Moodle's XAMMP packages to start off with. This will give you a complete install with all software required by Moodle. This way you can play around with it and break it

[Jiser]

Going to try moodle for VLE stuff, my manager did an evil laugh though when mentioning time consuming bits such as trying to integrate it with things.

 

LDAP / SIMS

[bossman]

@Geoff:

We have integrated the Mahara server block into Moodle 1.9 but not using yet, looks very good.

 

Downside is the authentication certificate key only lasts a month at a time.

[witch]

I now have moodle!

As I suspected, it didn't go smoothly and I needed a lot of help - well, actually bossman and webman did it for me. They gave up a lot of time to help me.

I have given you some rep

Thanks a lot guys, you've been great

Edited May 21, 2009 by witch