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Straight talk on the “free” LMS

Come With Us

Sharon Boller, President Kelly Davis, Multimedia Development

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an agenda

experience

The

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The Moodle Experience:Ours

The bottom-line (no pun intended): We needed to try Moodle for ourselves to see how it could help

us and how it could help our clients.

• 16 employees…but mostly scattered.

• Constant need to learn new techniques, tools, technologies.

• Huge need for informal learning• Desire to offer training to

external customers – and charge them for training.

• Desire to learn Moodle so we can help small organizations implement it for themselves.

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The Moodle Experience: Our first “wow”

She is going to cool conference where she will learn a LOT about what’s emerging in learning field.

She is staying at the office.

Kelly – this is okay as is; I’m going to leave this slide to go to a demo of Moodle. I’m going to show the DevLearn conference “course”

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The Moodle Experience: Now

Provide learning opportunities

Foster community

Communicate and update

Find and manage resources

Transfer learning from ONE to MANY

“Manage” learning and learners

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The Moodle Experience:Two others

Farm Bureau•~1700 employees – lots in the field•No budget for LMS•One person in training with a technical bent•Need to verify passing and completion•Huge desire to enhance informal learning

Sleep Train• 230 stores; 4 states, 1 training person, no $$ for an LMS.• LOTS of turnover – continual new product info to share•Need to verify people “passed” knowledge tests.

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The Moodle Experience:What it IS

Blogging tool Forums

Wikis

Testing and survey tool

Glossaries

Intended to help you build a learning

community

Repository for resources

Links to people,

other social networks

Formal courses

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• Used by millions• Adopted MOST by people with fewer than 5000 users• Experiencing dramatic growth – huge spike in past 6 months.• Free to download

Top LMS tools (marketshare)

1. Moodle (18.6%)

2. Other (16.6%)

3. Developed in-house (14.8%)

4. SumTotal (14.6%)

5. Saba (12.5)

6. Blackboard (8.9%)

7. Oracle (7.9%)

8. Plateau (7.5%)

9. Learn.com (6.7%)

10.SkillSoft (6.2%)

Organizations with MORE than 10,000

1. SumTotal (22.3%)

2. Saba (20.4%)

3. Developed in-house (16.8%)

4. Plateau (14.1%)

5. Oracle (10.9%)

6. TIE: SkillSoft and Moodle (7.9%)

8. Blackboard (7.6%)

9. SAP (4.6%)

10.Learn.com (4.3%)

The Moodle Experience:What it IS

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A development tool - it has no “C” as in LCMS

Something you have to learn all at once…before you implement anything

A commercial product - there’s no vendor behind the scenes to install, train, and support you…unless you hire a “Moodle” partner.

Super-quick to figure out/learn – it’s not HARD, but it does take time.Completely without costsOptimized to generate

lots of system-wide data

The Moodle Experience:What it is NOT

Installation and Configuration

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Installation and Configuration:Start to Now

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Installing and configuring:What to ask BEFORE you start

• Ask BEFORE installing!– Does a resource exist who is willing to learn

an open-source software application? Will my organization support open-source software?

– Will I have any IT support?– Do I have the money, time, and expertise to

host Moodle on my own internal server OR should I find an external host?

– If I decide to have an external host, should I get a dedicated server or a shared server? (Shared servers allow smaller file size uploads.)

– Who will be the system administrators? How will admins divide responsibility?

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• Hardware Requirements• Minimum 150 to 200MB disk space• Network or standalone

• Software Requirements• Database – MySQL is recommended• Web server – Apache is preferred• PHP – PHP 4.30 is required to run Moodle 1.9. It is

advisable to use PHP 5.24 or higher for Moodle 2.0. • PHP Extensions

• Moodle Packages• Standard• Mac OS X - local• Windows – local

Installing and Configuring:System requirements

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Installing and Configuring:Required skill/knowledge assets

• Knowledge assets– PHP (installation)– CSS (graphical look, positioning, etc)– MySQL (installation)– HTML (installation)– SCORM (course configuration)– Course design/development (course

creation)– Social media savvy (informal learning)

• Personality assets– Patience (installation, configuration,

development)– Confidence (i.e. can’t be afraid to try stuff

and see what happens)

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more on configuration…

Maintaining Moodle

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• Site administration• Course administration and

development• User involvement

Maintaining Moodle:Three considerations

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Maintaining Moodle:Site and Course Administration

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Maintaining Moodle:User Involvement

Data Tracking

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Data tracking:What you CAN get

• What reports can you get?– Site level:

• All/Individual activity logs across entire site or by course

– Course level:• All/individual participant activity logs• All participant grades• Individual participant reports

• What do these reports tell you?– Activity logs: what the user did, not how they did.– Grade and participant reports: completion, score, and

activity.

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• What if you want more? – Add-ons are available. Here are a few we have found but not tried:

• Category Activity Reports• Completion Report • Moomis

Data tracking:What you CAN get

The costs – really.

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Hard costs – pretty minimal

“Soft” costs (translate to personnel to make Moodle successful) can be more than people think.

The costs – really.

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• sharon@bottomlineperformance.com• kelly@bottomlineperformance.com