While some members of the technology-in-education community keep their eyes glued on the upcoming development of Sakai - a growing-in-popularity, open source course management system (CMS) - a small number of higher education institutions in the U.S. are having success with their adoption of another open-source and free CMS called Moodle.

Moodle is being rapidly adopted and used by several thousand education providers and organizations worldwide, and growing. Its development began in 1999 under the guidance of a former webmaster turned world-renown-open-source-CMS-guru Martin Dougiamas out of Australia (see "Interview with Martin Dougiamas" in this issue).

While there are many educators who believe, for a variety of reasons, that a viable open-source and free CMS system is not yet a reality (see "Ali Jafari’s Point of View" in this issue), three higher education departments interviewed by Educational Pathways have been using Moodle successfully and are very pleased with it.

One of the largest U.S. higher education Moodle installations can be found at the University of California, Irvine Distance Learning Center (UCIDLC). UCIDLC decided to go with Moodle in 2002 when the CMS product they were using at that time, called Prometheus, was acquired by Blackboard. Prometheus was created at George Washington University in the late 1990s and had been gaining success as an innovative, low-cost community-source CMS product, with about 65 institutions having licensed it before it was sold to Blackboard.

While the UCI campus does have a home-grown course management system, called EEE, that is used primarily to compliment on-campus courses, the developers of EEE (the Instructional Web Technologies team, which is part of Network & Academic Computing Services at UCI) advised UCIDLC to try using Moodle for its completely online programs. "They set us up for a test, and we played with it (Moodle), and we said that this is reasonably straight forward; people who know how to use the web should be able to do this without getting lost," said Larry Cooperman UCIDLC’s director of instructional design and technology. "We decided that the feature set was superior to EEE, and we went from a test account to going into production. It was literally as easy as that. They installed the software, and we were up and running very quickly. And furthermore, the number of support issues that arose from any difficulties using the system were very minimal and have been very minimal."

UCIDLC now uses Moodle inside two online certificate programs offered through the UCI Extension - one in investor relations and one in project management - along with a complete online master’s degree program, titled Criminology, Law and Society (see the Sept. ’02 issue of Educational Pathways), that is offered by UCI’s School of Social Ecology. Overall, about 1,200 students and 45 faculty currently use Moodle through UCIDLC.

Jia Frydenberg, UCIDLC’s director, explained that there was a smooth and "very simple" adoption of Moodle by students and faculty. "One of the huge advantages of Moodle is that it’s so intuitive for the neophyte faculty member or student." Frydenberg added that the online support Moodle community at moodle.org has proven to be "very interesting and useful."

Weatherford College’s Distance Education Office is another user of Moodle. This two-year college located in Weatherford, Texas has about 5,500 students and is part of the Virtual College of Texas (VCT) - (www.vct.org), a distance-learning collaborative of Texas’ 50 community college districts and the Texas State Technical College System. Weatherford College’s Distance Education Office offers about 150 online sections, through Moodle, with anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 students enrolled, depending on the semester. About two and a half years ago, as their enrollments started to quickly grow both locally and through their involvement in VCT, they adopted Moodle. Previous to Moodle, faculty teaching online were simply creating their own websites for their courses, primarily with Microsoft FrontPage.

Dixie Harrison, Weatherford’s webmaster who works for the school’s Institutional Information Services Department, was responsible for installing Moodle on its campus server, as well as for supporting its development and faculty training. "It was very easy to install," she said. "It’s very easy to maintain, and the explanations you get from the Moodle community are excellent. It was a matter of a couple of questions and making sure that my server could handle 500 people logged on at the same time."

Weatherford Economics Professor Mike McCoy, who uses Moodle in both fully online and hybrid courses, is a good example of someone who found Moodle satisfying. He has experience using two commercial CMS systems, WebCT and Blackboard, in previous positions he held at two other Texas community colleges. He said if the cost-issue of a free-open source system were not a factor in choosing a CMS, he would rank Moodle second after WebCT and a notch above Blackboard. When you add in the cost benefit of it being free, however, McCoy ranks Moodle above both WebCT and Blackboard. He said that "WebCT is not intuitive to the instructor or the student," although he does not doubt that it is a good system. "Blackboard is pretty intuitive," he added. "The neophyte instructor can get started pretty easily, but I didn’t feel like I had as much control over my site."

Another satisfied Moodle user is Alberto LaCava, professor and chairman of the Department of Computer Information Systems at Felician College, an independent Catholic/Franciscan College with about 1,700 students located in Rutherford, New Jersey. LaCava has been in charge of evaluating Moodle through a Pilot Electronic Learning Campus initiative. Felician does have another online campus in which it offers courses through the eCollege CMS. LaCava said that the idea of a Moodle pilot came about during the summer of last year "to see if Moodle would be able to do the same thing for faculty."

Currently the pilot has about 15 different online and hybrid courses and more than 20 sections, with a total of about 300 students enrolled. Eight of the sections are on-campus, lab-based, web-enhanced Introduction to Computer Information Systems courses. LaCava said the number of students in the pilot is more than the number of students taking courses through the online campus offerings. A local hosting provider has supplied the back-end server infrastructure to host these pilot courses in Moodle at no charge on speculation that the college might eventually buy into their hosting services.

LaCava claimed that "the faculty love using Moodle. The students find it easy to use. Teachers can customize their courses and make them fun. It is simple to use, and it gives you many interesting choices."

However, it looks like the pilot has run its course, as a distance learning committee recently decided to discontinue the Moodle installation. "The committee looked at all the issues of support and they saw that there was no company behind it," said LaCava. "They saw that there was no 24-hour hotline. They said it looked nice, and it was a great experiment, but they didn’t want to change to something that did not have the reassurance of 24 x 7 support."

LaCava added that plans are to continue using Moodle "at least until the end of this summer, and then, at some moment, we will probably pull the plug, but painfully."

Moodle - http://moodle.org

UCI Distance Learning Center - http://learn.uci.edu

How Moodle is being used at UCI - http://learn.uci.edu/cms/

Weatherford College - http://onlinecourses.wc.edu/

Felician College Pilot - http://mobiusnet.com/