Well, it’s been a day tooling around with Moodle and learning it’s ins and outs. There are a few things that I can certainly see that are appealing about it compared to WebCT. Chief among these are outlines for how courses are delivered. Moodle allows for weekly or topically based courses. You can do that in WebCT, but you have to think about it’s presentation, in Moodle it’s a choice right from the start. This is what I believe is the major difference between the systems and may be the “killer feature”.
Moodle’s course presentation/organization, in addition to the passion that users of alternative systems feel make it a system that will certainly pick up converts. But what Moodle lacks – at least I haven’t found a way to do it yet – is a way to “iconize” the interface. Moodle is a very text heavy interface and it presents just as many, if not more options to the user than say WebCT does (I’m a WebCT Group Admin, so I talk from that “hat” on this). But the options are “always there” as opposed to WebCT’s sectioned off approach. So to the user, it seems that things are much simpler, and to the admins, happy users are good users, even though the admin side of things might be a bit stickier, though on that front, someone with much more scripting cahones than I can likely make Moodle absolutely sing. But once users get past the early adopter stage, and into the apathetic/mustdo this because the Chair/Dean/Principle is saying so stage, I think you’ll find all these LMS systems lacking and right now, that once the passion for the teaching and using a tool that is believed to better facilitate that teaching starts to burn out, you are going to start to hear about how much they all “suck”.
Once students and instructors get to that “suck” point, screen candy becomes important. This is where the lack of icons (to me at least) is a minus on Moodle. Icons are not only screen candy, but they are abstract representations of concepts. By using icons to represent these icons, people are freed of a linear structure and are able to start to explore the content on their own terms. As an aside, I think the first CMS/LMS that starts allowing every object to be tagged by admin users and common users (separately or together) is going to have a real “killer feature” because then it won’t matter how a course is presented, it will be customized to the individual. This is facilitated now via blogs and journals to some degree, but for many that might be too much of an extra step – though it might be the case for tagging as well (how many untagged images are out there on Flickr?). Getting back on track, WebCT is the system that allows me to use icons to represent my concepts, but WebCT is a little too heavy on the icon side and even though Learning Modules/Binders help, they don’t provide enough scaffolding for users from a non pedagogical/learning psych background to structure a course or a lesson in such a way that they can provide the learner with what they need how they need it. Maybe this is why there is such a push away from WebCT on some campuses – not because the system is somehow not “good enough” or “tweakable”, it’s because there is not enough scaffolding to present the course materials in a meaningful manner. Because like it or not, instructors are much like students – students just want to know what they need for the exam, instructors are looking for a drop’n pop solution for their courses when they are using an LMS.
So how does all this fit in with management? Well it seems to me that the impression of flexibility is what is important with any LMS. So it’s not that one system is better than the other, it’s which installation has allowed their staff to do what they want to do with the system and who has provided the support to help them learn whichever system they are forced to be on. It is also which institution has a common system for all students and staff. Students don’t really like using more than one system for their courses (IT related students are obviously the exception to that, but even there, this is a consideration), so of they have to use more than one, they will sour to one of the two systems, and many will favour the underdog (which is likely more open). This student attitude will impact instructor attitude and that in turn will impact admin… so it’s all connected.
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