Now that Moodle, the open-source course management system, is fast approaching its 1.4 release we've started to give it a serious look over. So here is the first of what might become a series of impressions. I've looked at the 1.4 Developer release of Moodle, but this is pretty stable and is representative of what will be available by the end of this month (August 2004). Other people are doing a pretty good job of the comparison with proprietary VLEs so I'm going to focus on areas of specific interest to us.
Let's start with the positive stuff.
Moodle appears to be relatively easy to setup, configure and create courses with. It's PHP/MySQL based (it also works with other databases) which is reflected in the sizeable developer community which appears to have grown around it. Institutions which haven't committed to an enterprise version of a proprietary VLE, therefore, may find Moodle of interest. For example, in February Dublin City University opted for institutional scale deployment of Moodle.
Moodle is open source + support with the business model reliant on the latter. For the former go to moodle.org and for the latter moodle.com. I'm comfortable with this since there appears to be scope for creativity, public good and ethical business practice.
Authentication can be directly handled by Moodle or via an external database (including LDAP). I've previously tested authenticating Moodle via our test PostNuke site and this worked without a problem, i.e. ensuring that users could only access Moodle if they had accessed it via our PostNuke portal/content management system.
We found that, unlike Blackboard, Moodle really values data arising from discussions and so it's possible to remove a student from courses or even delete them from the system with their discussion contributions appear to live beyond their personal demise. It's also nice to see Moodle offering a range of discussion views so that there are options to the ubiquitious but perhaps dysfunctional threaded view.
Moodle asserts a 'constructivist' model underpins its design. This translates into 'communication functionality is important and people learn from activities supported by appropriate resources and assessment'. The implementation of this within Moodle is fairly intuitive with courses having three formats, i.e. topic based (less time pressure), weekly based (sense of pace++) and social (discussion orientated). The first two formats both allow resources and activities to be attached to the appropriate topic or time slot.
Moodle seems to recognize the importance of syndication with, to date, its forums (including news) and glossary producing RSS output for input to other systems. As far as RSS input goes there is a simple RSS component (a block in Moodle speak) which allows a single RSS feed for the home page or for each course. This means it's possible for syndicated resources to be made available to students. Pity it's only at the course level and with only one feed but there is obvious scope for further development.
There's some work also taking place in the integration of blog functionality within Moodle. Still a work-in-progress but this looks quite promising. I'm unsure whether this will offer blogs at site or course level only. It would be good if each student could have personal blog which they could choose to share with other users or not. There is a journal learning activity at the moment but that is more an assignment tool accessible by a single student and their teacher rather than a configurable private/shareable resource.
So what's less good?
All Moodle sites tend to look the same! To me, aesthetically, it's full of 'sharp' edges and has a tendency to garish colours. I understand, however, that Moodle themes are an important area of development and so I suspect sites will begin to be more differentiated in the future.
While I like the Calendar feature nice it would be good to be able to configure this as the default home page interface and expand it out to a daily/weekly/monthly view by default.
There is a simple batch enrol facility but no apparent equivalent for batch unenrol or user deletion. I suspect that for larger numbers of students the original developers assumed linkage to a central database leaving manual maintenance for the smaller-scale courses.
Want to clone a course or parts thereof? No XML import/export a la ATutor is implemented as yet (although it's slated); so placing reliance on backup and restore via a zip file is all you've got.
And what about those IMS specifications? Not much on offer here at the moment I'm afraid but I suspect this position will change as the Moodle impetus continues to grow. Anyway all these declarations of IMS compliance between leading vendors doesn't appear to be having an earth shattering impact on the ground … as yet:)
Some of the discussion on the Moodle developer forums have focused on the philosophical match of Moodle's learning activity + learning resource with that of the IMS Learning Design specification. The latter is considerably more complex in implementation than Moodle's relatively simple implementation … not necessarily a criticism.
While it's possible to configure timed release of lessons (really branching tutorials) I found such lessons to be accessible outside the times I had set. Maybe I'm just confused about the purpose of the 'available from' parameters. The timed chat facility is also available all the time although a message does appear telling you when the action is due to start.
Moodle, like most other learning management systems, assumes that most learning resources are best stored within its own digestive system instead of within a separate repository or distributed over a wide variety of sources. Again, this issue is recognized in the developer's forums and there is some work taking place on the development of a document management system, but this is still very much a work-in-progress. At the same time what's perhaps necessary is an equal focus on the support and exploitation of distributed resources via RSS/Atom etc.
What's also less good is the apparent paucity of documentation with worked examples on how to create a Moodle component. There are some commented sources but the environment could really take off if there a few really cogent books/documents on how to build Moodle. As it is I found myself scrambling around gathering bits of information here and there.
To conclude.
We've not yet looked at group and user management so I guess that's next.
As my previous Auricle articles have suggested I'm no fan of the current generation of VLEs but Moodle has started to break the mould. It's more conservative than it perhaps alludes to but it's easy to understand and results should be achievable quite quickly and so, despite my reservations, I found myself quite liking what's beginning to emerge. If I were a vendor of proprietary VLEs I would start to worry and perhaps rethink my business model.
What's that I hear … vendor X has announced that from next month they are giving away their full enterprise system … and you only need to pay xxx,000 for support 🙂
