Monday, September 10, 2012
Today's Lecture and Moodle
In today's lecture we had a very interesting speaker by the name Felicia Collins. Her power point presentation was directed at the use of Moodle under the context of online course taking. The presentation mainly focusing on her use of the software for elementary education. Before delving into what she discussed I first want to provide clarification as to what Moodle is. In its simplest form Moodle is an open source software used for the management of online courses. Felicia discussed some of the software's numerous add-ons which where all focused on making the running of the class smother and more natural. The lecture also briefly discussed some of the hosting options that teachers had for Moodle. These options included hosting on a personally owned sever or hosting through various companies. The intent was to also discuss the IT aspect of Moodle but, ironically enough, she had server credential issues. She then followed up her lecture by highlighting some interesting methods she used Moodle for in her classes. The one question that I felt was asked, but never answered, is as follows. Given the fact that Moodle is open source, which means support for the software is not guaranteed, than why would teachers use it? The problem I believe arises with an open source learning management system lies with support. When a corporation chooses to use a Linux/Unix distribution on their own systems they have numerous programmers and IT staff in place to take care of unforeseen issues. In addition to that fact some large corporations even develop their own Linux/Unix distributions. With that being said how does a teacher fix these issues, which will arise, and furthermore how does a teacher explain that to parents.
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