dumb question - at one point WebCT was going after Sakai, I "think", in court -- I may not have my facts right; at any rate, is anyone familiar with whether there has been a definitive settlement on this issue? not sure if it affects Moodle or not. I had some fun with Moodle -- another fun thing is there are places like opensourcehost that can help get moodle instances going -- which would help with scalability.
<br><br>would be fun to have an open content repository that LMSes could tap into through "checking out" course packages.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Dec 6, 2007 8:52 AM, gnome <<a href="mailto:gnome@greenglim.com">
gnome@greenglim.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">This is the first issue on the forum I can address as something other
<br>than a rank amateur. :-)<br><br>I've used Moodle, WebCT (now Blackboard), Blackboard before they merged,<br>and have looked at Sakai.<br><br>Moodle seems to me to be the clear winner. Not so much necessarily on<br>
technical grounds, although a good case could be made for that, but because:<br><br>1) it has by far the highest rate of adoption in schools. In<br>universities, it's a close second and gaining on WebCT/Blackboard fast.
<br>If OLPC adopted Moodle, they'd be plugged into what is already the<br>widest network of educators.<br><br>2) It is open source, and has a truly excellent set of support forums.<br>My simple questions have been answered within hours -- the advantage of
<br>a global community is that someone's always awake ;-) -- and more<br>difficult questions take a few days.<br><br>3) Technically, it is full-featured course management software. In some<br>ways, such as uploading some content, it is easier than WebCT. I have
<br>yet to find a way in which it is harder to use. WebCT has some new<br>whiz-bang features not available in Moodle, such as the ability to hold<br>quizzes in class where the questions are projected onto a screen and the
<br>students choose one of the multiple choice answers with remote<br>clickers. While this is very nice, it's hardly essential, and is rather<br>unlikely to be very useful outside of a fully electronics equipped<br>classroom. (At our college, I think we may have two.)
<br><br>Sakai looks very interesting, but from what I've heard, there will be an<br>institutional fee in the thousands of dollars, and it's not yet widely<br>adopted.<br><br>Speaking of institutional fees, WebCT charges us $65,000. That's per
<br>year. An individual license is a few hundred ($300?). Support is<br>somewhere in Pennsylvania. Or something. Like most commercial tech<br>support it's similar to a cardiac defibrillator. When you need one,<br>
it's never there, and you hope never to need it in any case.<br><br>Cheers,<br>quixote.<br>_______________________________________________<br>Olpc-open mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Olpc-open@lists.laptop.org">Olpc-open@lists.laptop.org
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