moodle: the open source VLE
The Dunstable College Moodle site has moved to a new address. This is now moodle.dunstable.ac.uk so please make a note of this and update your bookmarks, favourites etc.
If you had mentioned moodle in conversation a few years ago it would have caused raised eyebrows and quizzical expressionas amongst most colleagues. Now, the word has become synonymous with student intranet or virtual learning environment, espcially in the FE sector. To a large extent, universities have tended rather to look down on moodle, preferring the various individual or bespoke web sites and intranets they have had the resources to develop internally. But in the cash-strapped FE sector, this open source software - available free for anyone to download and play with - has become the solution and enabled huge savings when £20,000 a year plus contracts with the likes of Blackboard, WebCT, Fronter and others come up for renewal.
Dunstable College was a comparatively early adopter of moodle but found support necessary to ensure it was efficiently hosted and maintained. Whilst staff could reasonably easily access and develop course areas, technical staff were insufficiently familiar with the quite complex code and decided to host moodle externally, utilising the services of moodle experts in London.
Moodle does enable staff to provide on-line resources to students with just a little training and it has a load of educationally-orientated features that can be incorporated. There is, though, competition in the form of new web tools that offer alternative ways to do much the same thing. And many do so both more attractively and more efficiently. They are also much simpler for individuals to use. As yet, there is no single obvious free alternative but one has to wonder how long this situation will remain.
One of the leading proponents of using moodle has been Coleg Gwent and their Moodle Academy is well worth a visit for tips and tricks or just plain help.
Few moodle sites, however, look very modern or appealing and today's students notice these things. We have been looking at some other themes and links to those we like are in the right menu.