It seems to me that it is popular because it is easy to set up and use without spending lots of money. Though it requires quite a lot of time; but if you are enthusiastic that does not matter.
I also get the impression that it used a lot because of the frustration of Schools / Colleges not providing what teaching staff want. Consequently they do their own thing, quite understandable.
My major concern is, as I have said already, that this type of approach does not give any whole College involvement. To me, a VLE should be an integral part of the whole teaching experience and so needs to integrate both with MIS data and network protocols.
I can see why people set it up and use it; I would do the same thing. To me, that is more a reflection on the attitude of the senior staff and ICT technical support in many educational establishments.
For my part, I have set up a vanilla Windows 2003 server and I intend to spend some of half term trying to make it work. Even if I fail I am sure I will have learned something. I will also be working on my current VLE which largely satisfies my requirements even if it is a little eccentric at times.
Tim Harrison
-----Original Message-----
From: Virtual Learning Environments [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Alistair Young
Sent: 22 October 2005 15:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VLES] Open source VLEs
May I ask for a quick show of hands?
Are the majority of coders on this list also lecturers? Is this why Moodle
is popular, not because it's any better than other systems but because
it's PHP and has an easy learning curve for lecturers to start modifying
it?
Would a Java Moodle not have been so successful?
Do you think lecturers would rather lecture rather than code?
--
Alistair Young
Senior Software Engineer
UHI@Sabhal Mòr Ostaig
Isle of Skye
Scotland
> The question has been raised more than once (by the commercial suppliers
> on
> here mostly) about the amount of coding effort we are all putting in to
> tweaking open source systems for use on our campuses.
>
> The implication seems to be that we might be wasting public funds coding
> when we ought to be teaching.
>
> Well, having struggled to shoehorn pre-defined closed proprietary systems
> into our set up, and having put up with shortcomings in them that can't be
> put right except by unsatisfactory work-arounds, it seems to me that the
> amount of effort involved in resolving the same issues with OS systems is,
> on balance, less. And the added advantage is that those solutions are then
> shared in the community. This means there is LESS duplication of coding
> effort, not more. Furthermore, the coding effort is put in by people who
> understand the problem they are trying to solve because they live with it
> every day.
>
>
>
>
> Jonathan Darby writes:
>
>> Here is the article but you'll still need to buy the paper for the
>> fetching photos!
>>
>> Jonathan
>>
>>
>> Tackling a virtual Goliath
>>
>> Alison Utley
>> Published: 21 October 2005
>>
>> There's an open-source, economical alternative to the rigidity and
>> American flavour of off-the-shelf virtual learning environments, thanks
>> to
>> two Leeds University academics. Alison Utley meets a quiet challenge to
>> commercial technology's one-size-fits-all approach
>> Everyone knows that technology should be made to fit the way people
>> work and not the other way round. But in the world of virtual learning
>> environment (VLE) software, that wisdom can be frustratingly difficult
>> to
>> apply. Many academics have set out determined to embrace high-tech ways
>> of
>> working with students, only to find that the systems on offer are
>> difficult to customise to their own needs.
>>
>> Stuart Lee, head of learning technologies at Oxford University's
>> computing services, believes his experience is typical. "We have found
>> that commercial systems are very rigid and hierarchical, often use US
>> terminology and structures, and impose overly restrictive roles to tutor
>> and student," he says. Oxford's solution has been to eschew popular US
>> software products in favour of a freely available open-source
>> alternative
>> known as Bodington.
>>
>> Bodington was developed nine years ago by two academics at Leeds
>> University and Oxford's endorsement of their product has given its
>> supporters a much-needed boost. For not everyone in higher education is
>> convinced of the arguments in favour of Bodington, namely that it is a
>> freely available, flexible and academic-friendly learning environment
>> compared with its better-known rivals. But finding the resources to
>> continue developing Bodington has been a slog and the future is
>> uncertain.
>> Leeds itself has yet to decide whether it will stick with its own
>> homespun
>> product or ditch it and invest in a commercial VLE such as WebCT or
>> Blackboard. With a rapidly growing market share, the reassurance of
>> attractively designed user interfaces, features galore and 24-hour
>> helpline support, commercial packages can be difficult for universities
>> to
>> resist.
>>
>> Bodington's co-inventor Andrew Booth, a biochemist and professor of
>> online learning at Leeds, admits he did not set out to invent the system
>> with colleague Jon Maber. "We were trying to find ways to apply IT as a
>> way of supporting student learning in a university that had large
>> numbers
>> of students studying short modules," he recalls. The approach was
>> focused
>> on student support - identifying individual students' learning problems
>> and fixing them - rather than subject content.
>>
>> "We weren't interested in putting lecturers' notes on the web. We
>> wanted to find a way for tutors and students to communicate properly, so
>> we gave them the bare bones and left the departments to put their own
>> curriculum material in there," Booth says.
>>
>> This was important, he explains, because academic departments need
>> to
>> feel a sense of ownership of the system in order to have confidence in
>> it.
>>
>> Currently Bodington is in use across most of Leeds University and
>> each
>> individual modification becomes an invaluable part of the system's
>> development, allowing it to grow "organically" and respond to the needs
>> of
>> teachers and students.
>>
>> The fact that Bodington is an open-source system means anyone can
>> access the source code and develop it according to his or her own
>> requirements.
>>
>> Lee says the benefits of an open-source VLE at Oxford went far
>> beyond
>> cost savings. "The fact that we can change the source code and tailor it
>> to our own needs rather than being locked into someone else's code is
>> invaluable to us," he observes.
>>
>> In addition, he says, Bodington is easy to use and has the
>> advantage
>> of being developed by a like-minded research university. "We have
>> managed
>> to run and develop the VLE powered by Bodington with five members of
>> staff, plus all of the server costs, more or less for nothing for the
>> past
>> three years. This has saved the university somewhere in the region of
>> £450,000."
>>
>> Lee said there is already a good community of developers in the UK
>> from Oxford, Leeds and Manchester Universities and the UHI Millennium
>> Institute.
>>
>> They act as a collective pool of expertise supporting each other
>> for
>> free, either online or by phone, and meet up regularly. "As the pool of
>> developers and institutions using the system grows so does the potential
>> support - which means that this is a sustainable model," Lee says.
>>
>> UHI uses Bodington to cater for every module, course, lecturer and
>> student in the institution and Sean Mehan, head of e-frameworks there,
>> is
>> another convert. "There are a number of advantages over a commercial
>> system," he said. "Bodington completely maps the complex organisational
>> information model in a way that the major commercial alternatives are
>> completely incapable of. We are also able to rapidly tailor it to meet
>> all
>> of our institutional requirements, and to benefit from the investment in
>> developing and retaining skills and knowledge in-house." Cost savings
>> were
>> also paramount at UHI, he added.
>>
>> But what of the future? Booth believes the days of the monolithic
>> VLE
>> are pretty much over. "You can't get everything you need in one package
>> and different systems need to be able to communicate with each other, so
>> we are moving towards distributed learning environments," he says. "That
>> is the future and it is almost with us."
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adam Marshall"
>> <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 10:18 AM
>> Subject: [VLES] Open source VLEs
>>
>>
>>> Purely by chance, there's a large article in today's Times Higher
>>> (THES)
>>> about Bodington VLE accompanied by two rather fetching photos of Aggie
>>> Booth
>>> from Leeds University. Unfortunately there's no web version of the
>>> article
>>> to be had at the moment so you'll all have to go out and buy the paper.
>>>
>>> adam
>>>
>>> --
>>> Adam Marshall: OUCS, 13, Banbury Rd. Oxford OX2 6NN.
>>> Shameless plug 1: Use the Bodington VLE http://bodington.org
>>> Shameless plug 2: Use the LUSID PDP system, http://www.lusid.org.uk/
>>> Blog: http://ramble.oucs.ox.ac.uk/blog/adamm/
>>> Cheese of the month: Korbacik - Slovakian String Cheese
>>>
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>>>
>>
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>
>
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