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Straight talk on the “free” LMS
Come With Us
Sharon Boller, President Kelly Davis, Multimedia Development
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an agenda
experience
The
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The Moodle Experience:Ours
The bottom-line (no pun intended): We needed to try Moodle for ourselves to see how it could help
us and how it could help our clients.
• 16 employees…but mostly scattered.
• Constant need to learn new techniques, tools, technologies.
• Huge need for informal learning• Desire to offer training to
external customers – and charge them for training.
• Desire to learn Moodle so we can help small organizations implement it for themselves.
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The Moodle Experience: Our first “wow”
She is going to cool conference where she will learn a LOT about what’s emerging in learning field.
She is staying at the office.
Kelly – this is okay as is; I’m going to leave this slide to go to a demo of Moodle. I’m going to show the DevLearn conference “course”
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The Moodle Experience: Now
Provide learning opportunities
Foster community
Communicate and update
Find and manage resources
Transfer learning from ONE to MANY
“Manage” learning and learners
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The Moodle Experience:Two others
Farm Bureau•~1700 employees – lots in the field•No budget for LMS•One person in training with a technical bent•Need to verify passing and completion•Huge desire to enhance informal learning
Sleep Train• 230 stores; 4 states, 1 training person, no $$ for an LMS.• LOTS of turnover – continual new product info to share•Need to verify people “passed” knowledge tests.
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The Moodle Experience:What it IS
Blogging tool Forums
Wikis
Testing and survey tool
Glossaries
Intended to help you build a learning
community
Repository for resources
Links to people,
other social networks
Formal courses
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• Used by millions• Adopted MOST by people with fewer than 5000 users• Experiencing dramatic growth – huge spike in past 6 months.• Free to download
Top LMS tools (marketshare)
1. Moodle (18.6%)
2. Other (16.6%)
3. Developed in-house (14.8%)
4. SumTotal (14.6%)
5. Saba (12.5)
6. Blackboard (8.9%)
7. Oracle (7.9%)
8. Plateau (7.5%)
9. Learn.com (6.7%)
10.SkillSoft (6.2%)
Organizations with MORE than 10,000
1. SumTotal (22.3%)
2. Saba (20.4%)
3. Developed in-house (16.8%)
4. Plateau (14.1%)
5. Oracle (10.9%)
6. TIE: SkillSoft and Moodle (7.9%)
8. Blackboard (7.6%)
9. SAP (4.6%)
10.Learn.com (4.3%)
The Moodle Experience:What it IS
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A development tool - it has no “C” as in LCMS
Something you have to learn all at once…before you implement anything
A commercial product - there’s no vendor behind the scenes to install, train, and support you…unless you hire a “Moodle” partner.
Super-quick to figure out/learn – it’s not HARD, but it does take time.Completely without costsOptimized to generate
lots of system-wide data
The Moodle Experience:What it is NOT
Installation and Configuration
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Installation and Configuration:Start to Now
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Installing and configuring:What to ask BEFORE you start
• Ask BEFORE installing!– Does a resource exist who is willing to learn
an open-source software application? Will my organization support open-source software?
– Will I have any IT support?– Do I have the money, time, and expertise to
host Moodle on my own internal server OR should I find an external host?
– If I decide to have an external host, should I get a dedicated server or a shared server? (Shared servers allow smaller file size uploads.)
– Who will be the system administrators? How will admins divide responsibility?
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• Hardware Requirements• Minimum 150 to 200MB disk space• Network or standalone
• Software Requirements• Database – MySQL is recommended• Web server – Apache is preferred• PHP – PHP 4.30 is required to run Moodle 1.9. It is
advisable to use PHP 5.24 or higher for Moodle 2.0. • PHP Extensions
• Moodle Packages• Standard• Mac OS X - local• Windows – local
Installing and Configuring:System requirements
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Installing and Configuring:Required skill/knowledge assets
• Knowledge assets– PHP (installation)– CSS (graphical look, positioning, etc)– MySQL (installation)– HTML (installation)– SCORM (course configuration)– Course design/development (course
creation)– Social media savvy (informal learning)
• Personality assets– Patience (installation, configuration,
development)– Confidence (i.e. can’t be afraid to try stuff
and see what happens)
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more on configuration…
Maintaining Moodle
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• Site administration• Course administration and
development• User involvement
Maintaining Moodle:Three considerations
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Maintaining Moodle:Site and Course Administration
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Maintaining Moodle:User Involvement
Data Tracking
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Data tracking:What you CAN get
• What reports can you get?– Site level:
• All/Individual activity logs across entire site or by course
– Course level:• All/individual participant activity logs• All participant grades• Individual participant reports
• What do these reports tell you?– Activity logs: what the user did, not how they did.– Grade and participant reports: completion, score, and
activity.
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• What if you want more? – Add-ons are available. Here are a few we have found but not tried:
• Category Activity Reports• Completion Report • Moomis
Data tracking:What you CAN get
The costs – really.
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Hard costs – pretty minimal
“Soft” costs (translate to personnel to make Moodle successful) can be more than people think.
The costs – really.
