Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Moodle: The World's Favourite LMS


"It came as little surprise to us that Moodle has become the most used LMS by organizations of all sizes or that it was the most cost-effective LMS to install and customize. On-going costs of Moodle were also the lowest per user, not surprising given Moodle is Open Source and licence free. "

Read more here.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Monday, April 13, 2009

The Philosophy Behind Moodle

The design and development of Moodle is guided by a "social constructionist pedagogy".

From a constructivist point of view, people actively construct new knowledge as they interact with their environments.

Constructionism asserts that learning is particularly effective when constructing something for others to experience. This can be anything from a spoken sentence or an internet posting, to more complex artifacts like a painting, a house or a software package.

Social constructivism extends constructivism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings. When one is immersed within a culture like this, one is learning all the time about how to be a part of that culture, on many levels.

Read more here.

Thursday, April 9, 2009

LBCC Is Switching to Moodle

You may have heard the rumors, and now it's official: over the next 18 months we will be transitioning from Blackboard Academic Suite to Moodle as our CMS of choice.

We currently aren't quite ready to create new course shells in LBCC Moodle for Summer Term 09 enrollments, but anticipate being able to soon. Until then, we can created a development (sandbox) shell for you. You can build your course in that shell and (unlike Blackboard) change the Course ID number to that of your course whenever you want.

If you are an LBCC Instructor, and would like an LBCC Moodle development shell, email Paul Tannahill.

Recomended reading: Using Moodle: Teaching with the Popular Open Source Course Management System by Jason Cole & Helen Foster.

Stay tuned here for more updates!