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Hi Ted, My name is Stephen Knott and I am the ICT Development Coordinator at Countesthorpe Community College. My role here is to develop the school's VLE. I have used moodle in the past and helped the Adult Education Service improve/fix their implementation. I have found moodle to be a good VLE but not a perfect one. As it has evolved rather than been designed it can sometimes be a little perculiar. That said no VLE is perfect yet! As for the maintenance of moodle, well I am sure there will be other people around that can support it should your IT tech leave, although they need to be quite clued up about PHP/MySQL and related security issues. I know the LEA is concerned about the ability to exchange data between VLEs, and that moodle does not support this natively. However, most VLEs I have looked at support their own standard and so require some sort of translation to share data. In this sense, moodle with it's open source nature is in a far better position to provide translator/importers as these could be coded when needed. A concern I have with this is that in five years time when a school may choose to switch VLEs, a private company may not be that helpful in converting data stored in their own format. I know that the BECTA draft specs talk about using IMS and SCORM standards to help standardise VLEs stored data, so I guess it is a case of seeing which VLEs choose to comply with this. You can find a copy of BECTA's draft specs on the moodle website! Stephen ----- Original Message ----- From: Walker - Ted To: [log in to unmask] Sent: Monday, May 15, 2006 10:37 AM Subject: [VLES] LEA Advises against Moodle!!?? We are a 14-19 Community College and have adopted Moodle as a whole school VLE and are working hard to embed it across the college, with some success and interest so far. The Local Education Authority has just sent out a letter to school principals and heads discussing how schools should prepare for having a learning platform embedded by 2008; the jist is essentially to wait and see what they think might be best (as they haven't yet made up their minds) but, in any case, they explicitly advise schools not to use Moodle (the only software mentioned in the letter) as it depends too much on specific local support and knowledge. I think they are concerned about the possibility of schools sharing resources, and that, in their minds, "non standard software" won't network very well. I thought colleagues might be interested in this development, and would appreciate any comments. We are considering what, if any, response to make to this ourselves. Ted Walker Assistant Principal (Director of e-learning) Rawlins Community College Quorn Loughborough Leicestershire LE12 8DY [log in to unmask] ***************** List information: ***************** Remember - replies go by default to the entire list. Access the list via the web on http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/vle.html To unsubscribe, email [log in to unmask] with the message: leave vle ***************** List information: ***************** Remember - replies go by default to the entire list. Access the list via the web on http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/vle.html To unsubscribe, email [log in to unmask] with the message: leave vle