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I have spent the last couple of years building flipped curricula for undergraduate chemistry courses. It's had positive results, and I plan to keep developing it, but there are a lot of caveats.

No, you can not just tell your students to read the textbook outside of class, only about 10% of them will actually do it and you will spend your in-class time recapitulating the all concepts to them anyway.

True, you might have more success with upper levels or with something like a literature course. And you can get better results if you quiz them at the start of class, but that's a bit backwards, given your assumption was they would not understand the material until working problems with you, and takes up valuable class time. Requiring them to outline the chapters is a decent strategy except that it's hard to grade, is a lot of work for the students, and still leaves behind those who have the most trouble grasping overall concepts.

The difficulty with teaching inexperienced students is that they don't have any idea what the essential concepts are or why they are important. Textbooks are excellent references, but if they're heavy enough that you can use them as a weapon, then they contain far too much information for your average student to be able to recognize the salient points and how they fit together, at least until they've already been through the course. That is the purpose of lecture, which is basically rounding up all your students by the campfire and telling them a story that they will understand and remember so that they have a way to interpret all the detail in the textbook. For most of our history spoken story is how humans have learned and things like gesticulation and inflection are surprisingly important in creating a sensible emphasis.

In my courses I have ultimately chosen to produce online lectures delivered via a Moodle setup loaded with H5P. I am able to require my students to watch the lectures before class (for a grade) as well as embed interactive questions. Besides keeping my students from nodding off while watching, the questions force them to immediately interpret what they've seen and review the video if they have not understood important aspects. I include worked solutions so that they can do self-assessment on if they have made any errors. When they come to class they work much more complex problems which tie the concepts together. (Anecdotally, I can say this has been fairly effective in that my students seem to require much less "babying" than they used to and usually have more substantial questions to ask during the groupwork).

But it's taken a tremendous amount of time to put together -- I estimate about 5 hours to produce every 15 minutes of video. I am fortunate to be a fulltime lecturer; I don't see how I could have done it with research alongside. Nor could I have done it in my first years of teaching without having first accumulated some traditional teaching experience.

There is also the downside that offering this much help in solving problems can in some ways limit student's ability to develop independent skills. I could assign homework as well, but in this setup they are already assigned to watch videos and at some point you start being abusive of their time. The honest truth is no teaching method exists which can let every student fully retain the contains of a 15 hour course schedule and still live normal happy lives.

But, as helpful as I think guided learning can be, in my opinion part of our goal in college is to teach students to be capable of independent learning. My favorite courses that I have taken myself were not flipped -- they were skilled lecturers who assigned demanding homework problems (probably too long to be done in class anyway). If I needed help I could ask the professors questions during their office hours. This seemed to work well for my peers as well. But we were juniors and seniors at that point knew the ropes, had developed our o

Open source textbooks, reference material, and study guides are plentiful. Used textbooks are cheap. Amazon has a great service providing them.

Colleges and Universities frequently require the use of online, "digital learning systems", like Cengage. Access to that site, where the homework is, requires a subscription code that can be hundreds of dollars. A textbook without the "online access code" is a doorstop.

If schools are serious about this, they need to start pushing the use of Moodle instead of Blackboard, and providing high quality open source content including lesson plans, homework, and textbooks.

Personalization of the learning process could also be achieved by software. They track learner's progress through the subject matter, identify weak spots and focus more on them. The role of the teacher would be similar to that of a coach - to inspire, motivate, guide and oversee the progress of the students.

But what would we call it? Moodle? No that would never work. And even if it did - who would use it?

[sigh] Yes, I was being sarcastic. Moodle does all that and more - not just in theory, it's widely deployed and used throughout the world.
The wife of the world's richest (and allegedly) IT savvy guy thinks Ffffacebook solves the problem that has already been solved. There's your education problem right there.

Platforms such as Moodle are supposed to by style-agnostic, but doing anything other the basics leads you to have to code up arcane and esoteric dynamic pages, so everyone ends up with static multiple-choice question sheets online.

I'm a Moodle admin, and there are quite a few options for quizzes other than just multiple choice. The problem is that's what most publishers offer. If you're lucky, you'll get a test bank already set up for Blackboard or WebCT, which can be imported directly into Moodle. The worst though are Microsoft Word documents that I have to modify into something else. Thank God for regex! Aiken format is my go-to format if it's all multiple choice, but I'll also use Gift format if there's any fill-in-the-blank, multiple answer, essay, etc. formats included. It's not too bad, but something's telling me there has to be an easier way.

Platforms such as Moodle are supposed to by style-agnostic, but doing anything other the basics leads you to have to code up arcane and esoteric dynamic pages, so everyone ends up with static multiple-choice question sheets online.

I'm a Moodle admin, and there are quite a few options for quizzes other than just multiple choice. The problem is that's what most publishers offer. If you're lucky, you'll get a test bank already set up for Blackboard or WebCT, which can be imported directly into Moodle. The worst though are Microsoft Word documents that I have to modify into something else. Thank God for regex! Aiken format is my go-to format if it's all multiple choice, but I'll also use Gift format if there's any fill-in-the-blank, multiple answer, essay, etc. formats included. It's not too bad, but something's telling me there has to be an easier way.

Is it the Algebra module for Moode? http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/question/type/algebra, https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB/component/10326, https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98670

I worked nine years on such a system, called "ActiveMath" http://activemath.org/ then and now "Math-Bridge" http://math-bridge.org/, where I designed and implemented precisely the exercise system that does the answer evaluation: http://matracas.org/escritos/#exercise_system_report

There you can apply different tests to the student's answer, and one common use was to first check for the exact correct form, like "1/2", with a "syntactical" comparison of the expression tree parsed from the textual input. You would get the "Correct!" feedback for that one.
Then you could compare it "semantically" with the expected answer, which sent the expression to a Computer Algebra System for simplification in a specific context (set of simplification rules, depending on the task), so if you answered "2/4" you would get the feedback "That's correct, but not fully simplified. Please give the irreducible form.".
The exercise author can include any number of such classifier expressions to catch different forms of the correct answer, different half-done answers, and wrong answers, giving adequate feedback for each.
Feedback is not just text, but a complete "exercise subgraph" that could be entire sub-exercises intended to correct the misconception corresponding to the wrong answer given by the student.

Is it the Algebra module for Moode? http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/question/type/algebra, https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB/component/10326, https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98670

I worked nine years on such a system, called "ActiveMath" http://activemath.org/ then and now "Math-Bridge" http://math-bridge.org/, where I designed and implemented precisely the exercise system that does the answer evaluation: http://matracas.org/escritos/#exercise_system_report

There you can apply different tests to the student's answer, and one common use was to first check for the exact correct form, like "1/2", with a "syntactical" comparison of the expression tree parsed from the textual input. You would get the "Correct!" feedback for that one.
Then you could compare it "semantically" with the expected answer, which sent the expression to a Computer Algebra System for simplification in a specific context (set of simplification rules, depending on the task), so if you answered "2/4" you would get the feedback "That's correct, but not fully simplified. Please give the irreducible form.".
The exercise author can include any number of such classifier expressions to catch different forms of the correct answer, different half-done answers, and wrong answers, giving adequate feedback for each.
Feedback is not just text, but a complete "exercise subgraph" that could be entire sub-exercises intended to correct the misconception corresponding to the wrong answer given by the student.

Is it the Algebra module for Moode? http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/question/type/algebra, https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/CONTRIB/component/10326, https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98670

I worked nine years on such a system, called "ActiveMath" http://activemath.org/ then and now "Math-Bridge" http://math-bridge.org/, where I designed and implemented precisely the exercise system that does the answer evaluation: http://matracas.org/escritos/#exercise_system_report

There you can apply different tests to the student's answer, and one common use was to first check for the exact correct form, like "1/2", with a "syntactical" comparison of the expression tree parsed from the textual input. You would get the "Correct!" feedback for that one.
Then you could compare it "semantically" with the expected answer, which sent the expression to a Computer Algebra System for simplification in a specific context (set of simplification rules, depending on the task), so if you answered "2/4" you would get the feedback "That's correct, but not fully simplified. Please give the irreducible form.".
The exercise author can include any number of such classifier expressions to catch different forms of the correct answer, different half-done answers, and wrong answers, giving adequate feedback for each.
Feedback is not just text, but a complete "exercise subgraph" that could be entire sub-exercises intended to correct the misconception corresponding to the wrong answer given by the student.

It sounds reasonable in the abstract, but in practice it was utterly wretched.

No, the abstract does not sound reasonable: as with most things online you can always find bad ways to do it. I'm a physics prof working as part of a team to develop an open source, algebra capable question and content system. However even the current capabilities of something like Moodle (which is Open Source) is far in excess of what you describe. You can type in multiple "answers" to a problem and have the student get feedback and a partial grade if they get the problem wrong in a way that you managed to guess. Obviously if they find a new way to get it wrong then they will not get feedback though.

Commercial systems go even further with the student having the option to click on a help button which can break the question into steps for the student to complete in rder to guide them through to the right answer. This can be configured to give a grade penalty at the choice of the instructor - this is one of the features we want to add to an Open Source solution.

However even with current Moodle capabilities you can build a system that, I would argue, is better pedagogically for many physics problems (those with numerical or symbolic responses) than paper-graded assignments because, with an online system with some feedback and multiple attempts the student is encouraged to keep trying until they figure out how to get it right. This encourages them to think out the solution themselves whereas with a paper assignment they get one try and are then given the answer. To make this work though you need some means for students to come and talk to you and/or TAs to provide some help towards getting the right method. So you still need the student-teacher interaction but computers can provide a first line of contact and so let a teacher help more students.

That being said I find it exceedingly unlikely that this EdX system can work for written responses beyond checking that their english is good. For physics how can it possibly know that the statement "the Higgs boson has a mass of 140 GeV/c2" is wrong and "Dark Matter does not interact with photons" is correct? To be able to grade it will have to know a huge amount of information about a massive range of topics - and looking this stuff up on Google is not an option given all the crazy people and their wacky physics theories which they stick on a web page.

It may be overkill for what you need, but Moodle is open source & has a grade book. You can run it on a USB stick if you don't need to have it available over a network, and you can enroll your students with a simple plain text file.

What's the advantage to the school? You're talking about introducing highly complex IT systems that will require development and support, both of which are expensive. What's the school going to get out of this?

I work on (development, training, support, strategy, the whole lot) these sort of systems for a university, and even for us the list of "nice to have" features that aren't going to be implemented is huge (100+ items last time I looked). A lot of schools are adopting open source solutions such as Moodle ( http://moodle.org/ ), but we're still at the point that for many smaller institutions it just doesn't make sense on cost vs benefit.

http://moodle.org/

The original question is a false dichotomy; the question isn't whether or not college should go online or not. The question is under what circumstances is the application of information technology and integration of online access and collaboration to the university education process appropriate and to what degree?

I am the Moodle Coordinator for the University of the People, a completely online tuition-free university. We have students from 119 countries learning in a collaborative fashion through online discussion forums, downloadable resources, and assignments including peer-assessed work and online quizzes, exams, and projects.

The mission of the university is to provide "universal access to quality, online post-secondary education to qualified students". Without the online component (through the open-source Moodle LMS), the university could not hope to fulfill this mission without charging a large tution and pricing most of the world's population out of the market. All coursework is online, and from my own perusal of the course materials, I find the curriculum to be challenging.

While this model will not and should not completely replace the traditional university, it is a viable model for providing a quality education, particularly to those who would not otherwise have the opportunity for financial or other reasons. For example, the university has a number of students from Haiti who, due to the 2010 earthquake, would have no other options.

I agree with several other posters who state that there is something to be gained from the interaction with professors, students, and others in the university community. That, of course, does not preclude posting resources online, creating discussion forums, and having students collaborate through the Internet. As an undergraduate (at Penn State) I had several undergraduate courses with 300+ students - my largest had over 1000. The professors in these courses mostly lectured; why couldn't the lecture be posted online and the quizzes, exams, and papers be submitted online? Not to mention there were students who did not attend class, but rather purchased the notes from one of the note-taking companies on campus. What's the difference?

A strong argument could easily be made that the blended approach is best; the workplace is increasingly becoming more diffuse and more and more collaboration is done between remote locations; in my case I live in Japan and collaborate with my university colleagues in the US and Israel and with intructors and students from around the world. The modern university education needs to adapt to and reflect this reality.

On a side note, it would be great if more world-class unveristies and colleges put their coursework online for all to see like MIT is doing with its OpenCourseware project.

The statements above reflect my own personal opinions; I do not speak for or represent the University of the People in any way, shape, or form.

For those of you interested, here is more information on the University of the People.
Wikipedia
Inside Higher Ed

Huh, weird... does this prevent teachers from using Moodle / Blackboard or other online learning sites to run their courses as well? PROGRESS!! :-P

Heh, well, it's about time I got in trouble for setting up Moodle sites for my wife's classes :-P Is she going to have to take "uses technology" out of her resume as well?

Hi guys, I just wanted to make a comment on the latest with Moodle 2.x. I submitted this review on March 25th and in those few months there has been a lot of activity and progress made regarding performance issues, patches and bugs. Moodle 2.1 comes out today and the biggest (most important) improvement is the ability to import 1.9 courses into 2.1. Other updates include the ability to clone activities and resources and a question engine rewrite. I highly recommend admins to use http://tracker.moodle.org/ . See 2.1 release notes here: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.1_release_notes I hope this will help ease the transition/upgrade and if you have any questions I'd be happy to discuss and help out.

Hi guys, I just wanted to make a comment on the latest with Moodle 2.x. I submitted this review on March 25th and in those few months there has been a lot of activity and progress made regarding performance issues, patches and bugs. Moodle 2.1 comes out today and the biggest (most important) improvement is the ability to import 1.9 courses into 2.1. Other updates include the ability to clone activities and resources and a question engine rewrite. I highly recommend admins to use http://tracker.moodle.org/ . See 2.1 release notes here: http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Moodle_2.1_release_notes I hope this will help ease the transition/upgrade and if you have any questions I'd be happy to discuss and help out.

Moodle requires the following to be set in php.ini "magic_quotes_runtime = Off". Starting in 2.0 it is strongly recommended to disable magic quotes completely - http://docs.moodle.org/en/Errors_FAQ#Any_text_I_add_with_an_apostrophe_.28.27.29_or_a_quote_.28.22.29_causes_errors_or_comes_up_with_a_slash_added

The first couple of sentences should explain what the hell "Moodle" is. All I know after reading your introduction is that it's a thing of some kind with plugins....

Agree, but it's easy to Google...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle
http://moodle.com.au/
http://download.moodle.org/

It's a real product but this article smacks of being an advertisement.

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

It's also a good example of a successful FOSS project, with an active and growing user community, used by more than 38 million students in 212 countries, translated into 81 languages, and with thriving commercial support community.

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.

It's also a good example of a successful FOSS project, with an active and growing user community, used by more than 38 million students in 212 countries, translated into 81 languages, and with thriving commercial support community.

I stand corrected: there is a Moodle activity called Memorycards under development. Still, the original SuperMemo should be kept in mind for perspective on what is desirable (and for perspective on what to avoid).

http://moodle.org/

and/or

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

Second language teaching is pretty big, some estimates run to 1 billion learning English alone, and the UK alone estimates that generates 1.3 billion pounds/year in revenue.

Moodle, is by most estimates the most widely used online learning software with 49,000 registered sites in 211 countries and is also an example of a successful open source project ecosystem with commercial support partners in many countries.

Higher Education has become a giant business run by the state and federal government here in the US.

Education that requires lab work will get classroom time, education that is 100% paper chase can move
into the online realm like is has with online degrees.

The multiplicity of accreditation is insane, move to one national standard and move the hell on.

Going to one college using the same book, then transferring to find out they won't take the
credits even when they use the same damn book is insane !

If millions of ppl can stay home and not go park in gridlock traffic to go to class everyday
then I think they can spend their time in traffic on learning instead.

If you do not have to build multi-billion dollar campus monstrosities with Roman Coliseum
stadiums to sports deities maybe that could make for a better education.

The whole world could move to moodle and kick the current model to the curb,
and make 90% of education online.

http://moodle.org/stats/

If moodle is not good enough then upgrade it to make it happen.

211 countries, 37 million users, 1.1 million teachers, is a good start.

The public has been downsized now its time for the government fat cats
to be outsourced.

you can expect the price to be tailored to your individual institution, or in other words, likely several hundred dollars at least, probably in the thousands.

I think you missed "Per student" and "annually" at the end of that.

The typical customer licensing the works will pay $160,000 - per year. Even small victims are being bled for upwards of $50,000 every year just for the joy of being permitted to use Blackboard.

Blackboard doesn't sell to teachers or even individual schools, they target entire districts and school boards, aiming high enough up in the organization to be sure that nobody they meet will ever have to use their product, or have any idea of what Moodle is.

My impression is that this says more about Blackboard's security than anything else.

Time to switch to one of the FOSS (and in many ways superior) alternatives:

Moodle and Sakai

Really, it's amazing Blackboard is still around with two full-featured FOSS competitors in existence. I guess it's just testament to the power of lock-in.

I use OpenOffice for all my course content: slides, handouts, exams, diagrams.... For physics both the built in equation editor or the ability to embed editable LaTeX (via OooLatex) make it vastly superior to MS Office despite being slightly less polished. The other advantage is that I have a Makefile to automatically generate PDF files with one slide and 2x2 slides versions. If I could get OO to run in batch without needing an X11 connection to somewhere (even though it does not open a window!) I could probably embed the whole thing into Moodle and have it generate PDFs to student specifications on the fly.

The OU actively develops Moodle, particularly the quiz module. This works on all machines since it is a web application. You can also get several of their courses via iTunesU which is hardly Windows-based!

As a prof, I hate blackboard. It is the buggiest, stupidest, slowest education software I have ever had the misfortune to use.

Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.

Have you had a look at Moodle? I came across it the other day when I was evaluating Drupal for my website.

When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.

Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.

The Devil "Blackboard" was aquired by "Angel" as it's replacement.... somehow this seems like collusion between the forces of darkness and light..... Time to get back to digging my bunker.....

When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.

Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.

The Devil "Blackboard" was aquired by "Angel" as it's replacement.... somehow this seems like collusion between the forces of darkness and light..... Time to get back to digging my bunker.....

When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.

Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.

When it comes to VLS (Virtual Learning Systems) please don't give into the Blackboard marketing machine. Moodle is free and equivalent in just about everyway. It drives me nuts to see colleges and universities paying for crap like Desire2Learn and Blackboard when many of them are cutting back student services and laying off people these days. What's even worse is that both Blackboard and D2L have significant bugs and really bad customer support.

Our university (around 38,000 students) pays Blackboard $600,000 a year (yes there are five zeros after that six). Please try convince your PHBs to give Moodle a look. The community is massive and helpful. You can find hundreds of great pluggins as well.

Hier is the comment from Martin Dougiamas, lead developer of Moodle, "They have had quite a bit of involvement with Moodle in the past - a lot of their education customers use Moodle so they are forced to too, I guess. ;) For them it's obviously all about making MS services more attractive, which is fair enough."
Moodle Lounge

Did you forget that whole big thing about GPLv3 being incompatible with GPLv2? In fact, it would be stupid on their part to release source code to work with programs under incompatible license terms which would disallow anyone from legitimately being able to distribute it.

Except that's not how Moodle is licensed:

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

I'm not aware of any legal theory that makes distributing GPLv3 software with GPLv2+ software problematic.

I know it doesn't help much with the current problem your having, but you might want to drop a line to the college in question and let them know about the existence of Moodle. An open source virtual learning environment. The school where I work use it both in school and at home after hours. By all accounts the teachers and kids love it (and works in Firefox too!).

For 2 years out of undergrad, I taught high school. You know, giving back. My undergrad was in business, so I was a "Business Education Teacher," and, in my class, every student had a PC. To leverage this resource, I ran Moodle. I hand graded one test my entire two years.

However, the other "Business Education Teachers" taught people how to be secretaries. Students should achieve 40 WPM, and put it on their resumes. Students should know the ins-and-outs of Word and Excel, and skim over Access, since it is nothing more than a spreadsheet. 50% of the teachers had a 10-year tenure, and they yearned for the click-clack of typewriters.

To their defense, teachers have little time and encouragement for continued education. A standard day for a teacher is: 8 hours of instruction and classroom management, and 1 hour of "planning" (when you just wanted to relax). On the Friday after teaching my first week, I picked up a six pack and flowers for my wife, who had previously taught for 3 years. I then told her "I understand." I'm not a teacher now, and non-teachers do not know the continuous physical and mental effort it requires. You have to be "on" for 8 strait hours: standing, talking, controlling, watching, patrolling, inspecting, walking, cleaning, hollering, and protecting yourself legally, all at the same time.

Lastly, school management is composed of individuals who were teachers. They don't know what a cost-benefit analysis is, or a business process efficiency application, or an ERP. States shoved new requirements on school management every year, and school management response is reactionary. Administrators and teachers have initiatives come and go before, and they will again.

To introduce OSS to a classroom, you have to lead a classroom. To introduce OSS to a school, you have to lead a school. Similar to the other 100 new requirements for school administrators, a requirement of "OSS Implementation" will be lost in the shuffle. When next year comes, they will forget the OSS requirement, and handle the next 100 things.

Chris Winslett

You can use plain text or formatted HTML to create pages (attachments are easy to add) and it's easy to organize pages into an outline or (surprise!) a course format. Moodle also lets you set up forums, wiki's and so on.

Wiki's are good, but it takes some work to organize the pages. I like to create an "index page" for ease of navigation. You can do this with wiki trails in PmWiki http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiTrails

In MoinMoin http://moinmo.in/ you can use Categories to group pages.

With Moodle and wiki's, authorized users can edit the pages, including data in tables. which can be handy.

For personal notes,you might try:Tuxcards http://www.tuxcards.de/, KeepNote http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/(it easily handles screenshots or other images),Jreepad http://jreepad.sourceforge.net/ a plain-text-only outliner, or BasketNotePads http://basket.kde.org/. Like Tuxcards, Basket can export its contents to an HTML tree, which can be posted for others.

If you are adventurous, use a mindmap, such as FreeMind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/.

replace Blackboard with Moodle. When I was first starting to learn php, found moodle really easy to customize, in addition to just being great running on default. Nothing that NEEDS to be configured much to get started any more than Blackboard. Blackboard does provide hosting, but at an outrageous rate that is not really a 'hosting' price. On the other hand I have gotten many more teachers to use the Blackboard system just telling them how much the district spends per year just to have the service available.

On a side note, when the tubes came to the district, one high school hired a bunch of IT people, and the other had an industry experienced teacher run several classes that had students expand and maintain the network. The student run network was quite superior. In 1998 they managed to get an OC3 line DONATED by a local company, and a partial Class B Internet license, just to name a few things. Downtime was negligible and never during school hours. While the 'professional' school dwindled with poor service, and just the local service paid for by the school, the student run program was scraped after 4 years when students that graduated had not documented their code. It was mostly customized FreeBSD setup. (The other school was using NT4). Rather than addressing the issue with the teacher, program was terminated permanently. They hired a bunch of techs to take their place, and within about 2 years they decided it was too expensive and now there are some 6 people that go around fixing problems for the whole district.

And THIS in Silicon Valley!

I may have missed some of the details of all what happened, but I do know the kids today don't know hardly anything about computers other than how to play video games, but props to the few that can customize a myspace page. Now, email or Internet access in general is out every few days for up to several hours. Rarely, but a few times, it has been out every day for about 2 hours in the morning for a week+.

Too bad something like technology can't be used directly to teach students about the modern world, like, the technology itself while making money to have a quality infrastructure. Oh well.

Just to note, I asked the IT staff about OpenOffice, because I heard they were having major budget problems, and they said that they did a 'trial run' and for too many teachers they concluded the transition would be too difficult, and too many teachers couldn't figure it out. They are going to transition to Office 2007 instead for all the computer labs (eventually as they can afford it). I stopped making suggestions after that.

Anyway, shout out to Moodle for anyone interested in education. It is simple enough I would recommend it to (tech savvy) parents to use at home to manage their kids homework and chores, just as an idea.

I worked for many years as a systems/network administrator for the school district in my area. Through that and my engagement to a school teacher, my passion for technology in education has grown tremendously. Unfortunately, the biggest problem that I was always facing came mostly from the administration.

Some of the older school district administrators believe technology in the classroom to be an educational distraction, and at that point, the funding just isn't there. A superintendent who doesn't feel the technology belong just don't want to pay for it.

After I was given the funding, or sorted out grants on my own accord, it came down to the teachers. Most of the teachers I was involved with just didn't care about the technology. They weren't interested in using it or learning it so they weren't even going to begin to teach it. Some of it came from very little personal exposure to technology, some from the general "well I just don't see the need" mentality, but most came from the fact that they have very little time to get to it.

To expose the teachers to the technology, I would hold training courses designed around commonly used applications for both teacher and student use. These would be open to any of the staff. This had limited success at first, but after they started to see the benefit from those who were putting it into practice, more began to show up.

To deal with the time constraints, I would center the trainings around integrating technology into the everyday instruction. The use of Smart Boards or Mimios for presentations and interactive lessons on the board was very effective. The other was the hugely successful implementation of Moodle and the beginning of the deployment for Mahara (both of which can be found at www.moodle.org and www.mahara.org respectivly). Moodle allowed entire lessons with video, interactive flash activities, assignments, quizzes, and just about anything else you can think of to be available in class, after class, before class, or whenever. Mahara was our branch away from MySpace. The students felt connected to it in a similar way, but it was a controlled environment focused on education.

I wonder why the example mentioned is Sakai? Anyone working with Open Source Software in the education knows very well that the real success story is Moodle. Unfortunately the article doesn't go into details in this regard, so I'm left just thinking that it's another case of Big Organization Blindness.

There are many OS projects in education, and many (schooltool, claroline, sakai, moodle, drupaled, edubuntu, etc) have been mentioned in this thread.

Tom Hoffman, the lead on the schooltool project, has had an open source SIF Zone Integration Server for over a year: http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2007/03/wye-zone-integrat ion-server.html -- this latest version is the successor to TinyZIS

Center SIS and the Miller Group ( the folks behind os4ed -- see http://www.miller-group.net/content/view/113/1/ ) had a dust up last year with one of the original developers. For details, see http://arcknowledge.com/law.gpl.violations.legal/2 006-03/msg00008.html and http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=32423

As a result of this issue, we also have Focus/SIS as another open source alternative: http://www.focus-sis.org/

So, we have a plethora of possible solutions -- what would be nice to see is some collaboration between these different groups, with clearly defined APIs and code examples to simplify data transfer between apps. Tom Hoffman's SIF ZIS has a lot of potential in this area.

NOTE/DISCLAIMER: I am active in DrupalEd -- not that it has any relevance to this post, but some might claim that my involvement in an OS project eliminates any possibility of objectivity :)

Did you try this Sakai and Moodle? Though Sakai is developed by universities, it should be adoptable to schools. Likewise Moodle is also a maturing project with various features being builtin.

Moodle is a large GPL PHP project that has benefited from Microsoft funding. Last year Microsoft paid Moodle core developers to add MS SQL Server support in Moodle to let it work better in institutions used to Microsoft platforms.

      http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=57989

The developers actually used the chance to revamp their whole database abstraction layer, effectively adding support for a number of other commercial databases as well (Oracle, Interbase etc). ;-)

Microsoft also developed Sharepoint web parts for Moodle, and an extension for Word that allows teachers to publish straight into Moodle.

      http://www.codeplex.com/Moodle2003WP

Yes, it's true there was a business case for Microsoft, because some very high profile institutions can now switch to using MS SQL, but I think overall it was a win-win for all concerned.

Moodle is a large GPL PHP project that has benefited from Microsoft funding. Last year Microsoft paid Moodle core developers to add MS SQL Server support in Moodle to let it work better in institutions used to Microsoft platforms.

      http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=57989

The developers actually used the chance to revamp their whole database abstraction layer, effectively adding support for a number of other commercial databases as well (Oracle, Interbase etc). ;-)

Microsoft also developed Sharepoint web parts for Moodle, and an extension for Word that allows teachers to publish straight into Moodle.

      http://www.codeplex.com/Moodle2003WP

Yes, it's true there was a business case for Microsoft, because some very high profile institutions can now switch to using MS SQL, but I think overall it was a win-win for all concerned.

I second the question. Serious omission not listing Moodle. I've used it in classes, as well as WebCt. I know other profs who've used Moodle, Blackboard, and WebCT.

Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT. The license to use WebCt runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.

Several comparisons of the main packages are available. Graf and List (2005) is an academic paper comparing nine different ones and is perhaps the most comprehensive. (2005 was a long time ago, in software time, so some of the comparisons might be different now.) They find that Moodle edges out the whole field.

At that point Sakai was just starting. Sakai is a well-funded effort at the Ivy League level to reinvent the wheel, which they're doing well, but at a licensing cost of thousands of dollars to universities. (Free to individuals, I believe.)

Munoz and Duzer (2005) at Cal State Univ. - Humboldt, compare Blackboard and Moodle, where Moodle also wins.

And for that matter, Ask Slashdot did a post on alternatives to Blackboard in 2005. Again, Moodle (and Blackboard) have come a long way since then, so comments may or may not be justified.

All the more recent, less formal evidence, suggests that Moodle has been pulling ahead, not falling behind.

http://moodle.org/ is a huge site with enough resources to drown a battleship. One of the interesting corners is a map showing where most of the thousands of moodle sites worldwide are located.

I second the question. Serious omission not listing Moodle. I've used it in classes, as well as WebCt. I know other profs who've used Moodle, Blackboard, and WebCT.

Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT. The license to use WebCt runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.

Several comparisons of the main packages are available. Graf and List (2005) is an academic paper comparing nine different ones and is perhaps the most comprehensive. (2005 was a long time ago, in software time, so some of the comparisons might be different now.) They find that Moodle edges out the whole field.

At that point Sakai was just starting. Sakai is a well-funded effort at the Ivy League level to reinvent the wheel, which they're doing well, but at a licensing cost of thousands of dollars to universities. (Free to individuals, I believe.)

Munoz and Duzer (2005) at Cal State Univ. - Humboldt, compare Blackboard and Moodle, where Moodle also wins.

And for that matter, Ask Slashdot did a post on alternatives to Blackboard in 2005. Again, Moodle (and Blackboard) have come a long way since then, so comments may or may not be justified.

All the more recent, less formal evidence, suggests that Moodle has been pulling ahead, not falling behind.

http://moodle.org/ is a huge site with enough resources to drown a battleship. One of the interesting corners is a map showing where most of the thousands of moodle sites worldwide are located.

Moodle (moodle.org) is great, but so is that other Free Software e-learning and course management web application Dokeos (dokeos.com). (A fork of ex-Claroline, by the original authors, who are no longer employed by the UCL who owns the trademark Claroline.)

Which one is the best, Moodle or Dokeos, ultimately comes down to personal preferences. In general Dokeos is more Blackboard-like, and I know several institutions who choose Dokeos because of the lower learning curve, having used Blackboard before.

Also worth noting is another free software package, a project funded by the (Mark) Shuttleworth Foundation: SchoolTool (schooltool.org), including SchoolBell. It's not an e-learning and course management web application, but rather a school infrastructure administration tool.

If the story is about "Open Source in education success stories" and it does not even mention Moodle (http://moodle.org/), I won't hesitate to consider it worthless. Moodle is the biggest Open Source success in education. To be completely ignorant about it is to be ignorant about Open Source in education.

I'm taking a UNIX and an SQL class at Sierra College, and apparently we just switched from Blackboard to Moodle this semester. The instructor (I have the same one for both classes) raves about it being better than Blackboard in many ways, such as being able to have nested replies in threads.