Today I interviewed Dublin City University's Morag Munro who gives an honest and very informative account of the motivations and processes involved in migrating from proprietary VLE systems to the open source Moodle system. The DCU interview also was our first use of a new (to us) and, IMHO, pretty efficient technique for recording Skype interviews and avoiding the dreaded echoes that can often plague those trying to record interactions using this otherwise impressive communication tool. As you'll see in the 'Most Recent Auricle Podcasts' panel there's a new arrival; one that may be of interest to a lot of people. Dublin City University (DCU) bit the bullet a couple of years ago and migrated from WebCT to Moodle. Prior to WebCT, they had been using TopClass, another proprietary system, whose vendor decided to exit the HE sector.
A key driver seems to have been DCU's desire to get control of its own destiny and not depend on the vagaries of what proprietary systems, or vendor's thereof, will allow them to do. Two years ago that was pretty brave but it seems to have paid off for DCU. What's particularly notable is the relative ease with which they seem to have integrated Moodle into their institutional systems. I was particularly interested in scalability issues but again with ~13,000 users on the systems there appears have been no major problems.
Anyway, I think it's a good listen and certainly reinforces James Farmer's recent forthright view that:
” … our universities, schools and other educational institutions are wasting enormous amounts of money and making huge mistakes using commercial software where open source software could do as good as or better a job.”
All Auricle podcasts can be viewed by selecting the orange 'Podcast' button at the bottom of the menu.
As for that efficient Skype recording technique? … that's going to be the subject of another Auricle post;)
