Friday, September 07, 2007

2007 - the year of Moodle?

It's everywhere. Even my next door neighbour has heard of Moodle (he works in a sixth-form college)! Here in UCL, it has been adopted as an official VLE, having been a pilot service for a year or two.

With colleagues, I have been putting together simple course structures and courses for a variety of levels (undergrad/postgrad modules and executive training). Point Click, prod, poke, bosh. Sorted. Not much real need to read the manual. So far so very easy. Compared with WebCT, the process of course creation is much speedier. The interfaces are generally much less clunky and the metaphors are straightforward enough that even a particularly notoriously un-techy teacher doesn't constantly crash things.

One thing I particularly like is that any item (file, activity, quiz) has a static URL [1] that can be used anywhere else. An obscure URL, but a URL nonetheless. This makes integration with other sites and blogs possible. Another thing : the feeds and email hooks mean that Moodle courses aren't forgotten, allowing integration the other way. WebCT, as I recall, was a black hole, almost nothing went across its event horizon.

We are still learning the ins and outs (there are a few bugs, which Julie knows all about), and we have yet to receive proper student feedback.

I'm looking forward to rolling out programme-wide Moodles for at least a couple of MSc's later this year. I'm also looking forward to the software itself stabilising. The sunny uplands of Version 3. UCL has 1.6 right now, and 1.8, 1.9 are out there in development-land.

[1] It still mentions a script called view.php, so, according to the ultra-pure W3C, can't be considered "cool". Unlike Sir Tim.