Category Archives: Moodle
Dancing with the devil: a view from Blackboard's European conference
In the heart of downtown post-industrial Manchester, currently basking in sweltering Mediterranean temperatures, Blackboard is hosting its European Conference, BbWorld Europe ‘08. Michael Feldstein has described the attack on Blackboard’s market share from Moodle. Whether this has anything to do … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Moodle, Web 2.0
2 Comments
59% of UK colleges now using Moodle
Rob Englebright reports recently on the JISCmail VLE List about an unoffical wiki-based survey of VLE usage in UK colleges. Of 156 colleges it’s now Moodle 59%, Blackboard 28%. The detailed breakdown is: Moodle 93 including 4 using moodle in … Continue reading
Latest version of VLE released at Open University
Our latest incarnation of Moodle was released this morning. New functionality includes: Audio resources pages – enabling audio files traditionally distributed on CD/DVDs to be made available as mp3 files for download New blog module – we found the existing … Continue reading
Posted in Announcements, Moodle, OU VLE
Comments Off
Open University selects Elluminate for desktop conferencing
A press release yesterday announces the selection of Elluminate for our synchronous desktop collaboration and communication requirements. This comes after a lengthy procurement process in which 14 vendors submitted tenders. Elluminate scored the highest on our educational and technical criteria. … Continue reading
Posted in Announcements, Collaboration, Moodle, OU VLE
Comments Off
Tutors give their verdict on new gradebook
Initial feedback on the new Moodle gradebook is promising. Tutors on the Open University course SDK125 “Introducing health sciences: a case study approach” reported: Gradebook seems very useful, as I now get to view a list of all of my … Continue reading
Posted in eAssessment, Moodle, OU VLE
Comments Off
How to integrate VLEs/LMSs with other student-facing systems
This is a major issue for universities. Back-end integration work is carried out so that details of which courses students are signed up to and which lecturers/teachers/tutors are assigned to them are generally passed from the central systems to the … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Moodle, OU VLE
Comments Off
Blackboard to integrate with Moodle?
Unless I’m missing something it’s not obvious from Blackboard’s website what their future development roadmap is but a recent posting to the Blackboard Midlands User Group, pointed out by A.J.Cann shows some of the things that are being talked about … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Moodle
Comments Off
Moodle meets SAKAI
I’ve just been at a workshop organised by Joel Greenberg exploring the potential of bringing Moodle and SAKAI together. There were representatives from Cambridge, Nottingham and Michigan Universities, plus the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the OU. Chuck Severance, former … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Moodle
Comments Off
Runaway objects and elearning
I’ve just been attending sessions by Etienne Wenger and Yrjö Engeström organised by the Practice-based Professional Learning CETL at the Open University. One quote I particularly liked from Wenger, the communities of practice guru was: Communities of practice can be … Continue reading
Posted in Architecture, Moodle
Comments Off
VLE tool league table
Chris Jones and Anne Jelfs recently evaluated a two-week course called Moodling for Beginners which was carried out earlier this year with 80 Associate Lecturers (tutors) from the Open University (OU). The participants were from all faculties and all OU … Continue reading