News Releases
News from
Lane Community College, Eugene, Oregon
Public information officer: Joan Aschim, (541) 463-5591, aschimj@lanecc.edu
Source: Joe Escobar, instructor, social science, (541) 463-5581, escobarj@lanecc.edu
For release April 24, 2006
Lane Community College chooses Moodle as learning management system;
College continues its tradition of innovation by embracing open source
EUGENE - Lane Community College, a Vanguard Learning College and member of the League of Innovation, continues its leading edge tradition of innovation by choosing Moodle as its learning management system. Beginning fall 2006, Moodle will replace WebCT as the principal vehicle for online courses as well as traditional courses with online learning components.
Moodle is a full-featured learning management system which offers students easy access to course content, assignments, tests and grades, and provides online forums and chat rooms for students to interact with their instructors and each other. It differs from other learning management systems in that it is designed by educators for educators according to a "social constructivist" model of learning, where students are active and contributing members of an online learning community.
Moodle is open source software, which means that it has no licensing costs and may be modified and customized by users and developers.
"The open source aspect was a really big selling point," said Jeffrey Borrowdale, one of the faculty spearheading the selection process. "If there is some aspect of Moodle that doesn't quite fit your needs, it's often a mater of just tweaking a few lines of code. You also have the support of a worldwide community of developers and instructors at Moodle.org, collaborating on the software and its applications. When you have 100,000 registered users speaking over 70 languages in over 150 countries working together, the results are nothing short of amazing."
Moodle is supported by partners who give a fixed percentage of what they charge for consulting or hosting fees, and by donations from educational institutions and private individuals. Lane has committed to contributing at least $1 per instructor per year to Moodle and is challenging other public and private K-12 schools, colleges and universities to do the same.
"A dollar a year for each instructor using Moodle is really a drop in the bucket in the multi-million dollar budgets of even the smallest institutions," said Joe Escobar, the faculty member who introduced Moodle to Lane in fall 2004. For a large institution such as Lane Community College, this amounts to less than $700 a year. The college had been paying close to $9,000 a year for a limited seat license for WebCT.
"We are saving thousands of dollars in licensing fees and our faculty and students love the system; it just makes sense to give something back," added Meredith Keene-Wilson, another faculty member involved in the selection process, currently working to "brand" Moodle to harmonize with the look and feel of the college's website.
Lane's Information Technology Department is happy with the change, since its support duties will no longer be split between two systems. The change will also make life easier for Lane's Student Help Desk, which assists students with technology questions related to their college work. And of course all of this geared towards improving the online learning experience of Lane students.
Like most public institutions of higher education in Oregon, Lane is undergoing budget reductions. Expecting to grow its online classes and introduce new "hybrid" classes in the fall (in which credit hours are split between online and classroom instruction), Lane was going to outgrow its current WebCT license size. It was also looking at major increases in costs related to additional hardware and database licensing, were they to switch over to BlackBoard, in use at the nearby University of Oregon.
On the other hand, Moodle was free, though Borrowdale is quick to point out that price was not the overriding factor.
"We had vendors from WebCT, Blackboard and Moodle all come to campus and make presentations to the faculty, and Moodle won hands down for its ease of use, versatility and the richness of its feature set, apart from any question of cost."
After less than two years, more than 80 faculty use Moodle to conduct online classes or enhance their traditional classes at Lane, more than twice the number of those using WebCT, in use at the college since 1997. During spring term, WebCT users will be converting their classes to Moodle with the help of a free, open-source script developed by another "Moodler," Dan Stowell of the life sciences faculty at University College London, who made the script available for no cost on the Moodle.org website. Moodle will also be replacing the software used to administer proctored computer testing in campus labs.
"The transition has been going smoothly," said Escobar, who has been assisting instructors with the change. "Once faculty are shown how easy it is to switch over and see all that Moodle has to offer, they're sold."
###
