kalinic

I agree with what you're saying. Moodle costs hardware and staff time. However, for that money gets invested in a server that's here to stay for a while at least and can be used for other things if something better than moodle comes along. With fronter you just pay for a yearly license. Nevermind the installation costs and paying for extras. As for staff time, I'm the e-learning coordinator hired to work with an VLE. I could take fronter and train staff on it and then watch the shiny lights blink on our new piece of kit. I however prefer to use the option that moodle gives you, which is to figure out stuff for yourself. I suppose most people prefer clockin on, daily grind, clocking off. Yes there are companies that provide moodle consultancy, but you dont have to take it, everything is online, you just need to spend some time browsing, asking questions and learning things for yourself. I'd also suggest anyone to spend some time creating comprehensive video tutorials for staff. They save loads of time on training.

To answer the rmarshall-bgsboys question: We bought our own web server, and we intend to run it from here. It can also be ran over the network alone. We're just gonna make use of our 100mbit (synchronous) internet connection. I do not know how much we're paying for it as I think that the harrow council is taking care of that.

Moodle is free. Fronter is not. It costs thousands. Fronter has a few extra features over moodle, but moodle isn't some package made by a handfull of geeks. Also, if most schools were to take up moodle, the resources could be shared too. As an example, check out http://www.e-subjects.co.uk Fronter is pushing its ability to link up with SIMS. Well SIMS is MSSQL, and there are free converters available to get it converted to MySQL. Besides, has anyone here had a pain free SIMS experience? That software package and their support is so poor. We're considering replacing it here. I had some tough time figuring out IIS, MySQL, PHP and the whole Moodle installation and setup, and it took me weeks, but in the end I did figure it out, and Im not an IT expert. Fronter would mean easier life for me, when I got someone else to do most of my work. However, I must be mad for thinking that taxpayers money should have some value to it. It's not as if it's coming out of our pockets.

We're based in harrow. Have you had a look at Moodle at all? It's free, and it pretty much does the same thing.

I work in a 6th form college and just have managed to install and configure Moodle on our intranet and was intending to put it online. However, a VLE by a company called Fronter is suddenly being pushed by the LGFL. If I have to be perfectly honest, the whole deal just seems so dodgy for the following reasons: - LGFL doesn’t mind which VLE we get, as long as it is Fronter (because then they get a group discount) - Fronter presentations are vague and have poor detail. Actuall tehnical details are really being discussed nor they are mentioned on their website. They basically can't stop giving the salesman’s talk about how simple Fronter is, and what great features it has, and that it can work with SIMS (which is awful anyway) which basically only appeals to the school Heads who usually are IT illiterate and just want to please the teaching staff who have the same level of knowledge. - LGFL is paying for a free 1 years installation and trial, which means low-tech capable people will get hooked on it and find it almost impossible to change over to a different VLE if Fronter is no good - follow the example of Edutrack and SIMS, which are both poor - Any details involving costs are always discussed last and not present on Fronter's web site; i.e. year cost, upgrades cost, cost of the machine needing to run Fronter (if its ran on site rather than online), costs of additional modules I might be wrong about all this as I haven't used Fronter myself, so I need opinions. Thanks in advance