LSE to adopt Moodle as the new institutional VLE
April 30th, 2007 by Steve Ryan.Following a year of evaluation, LSE has decided to adopt Moodle as its Virtual Learning Environment.
We believe Moodle has many advantages for both staff and students and these were clearly flagged up during our pilots. They include:
- Easier to use (for both staff and students); courses can be developed and updated much more easily than WebCT.
- More powerful and flexible with a range of new features including learning journals, blogs and wikis that can be used for teaching
- Much greater flexibility over ways in which courses are organised: you can choose to organise your course on a weekly basis (probably the most common option) but also by topic or around a discussion board.
- It also has much greater control and flexibility over who can be given permission to access the course.
- More flexible discussion tools.
A key advantage of Moodle, is that as it is an open source system, it can be developed and customised in ways in which the School wants. Completely new tools and features can be added and we can share features developed elsewhere. The Open University for example, since its adoption of Moodle has developed a number of important new features and these are made freely available to the rest of the Moodle community.
Moving from one VLE to another is not a simple process for CLT. We plan to migrate from WebCT to Moodle over two years. In most cases, for the 2007/8 academic year Masters and Languages courses wishing to use a VLE would use Moodle and in the following academic year undergraduate courses would similarly be transferred. The CLT would be responsible for migrating the course content currently in WebCT into Moodle so that it can be updated in good time prior to the beginning of the academic year.
If you would like to know more about Moodle please contact the Centre for Learning Technology (Email CLT-enquiries@lse.ac.uk). We will be holding a series of briefing events open to all staff in May. These are scheduled for
- Wednesday 16th of May 12-1 pm
- Thursday 17th of May 1-2 pm
- Wednesday 23rd of May 2-3 pm
Please click on this link to book a place (LSE staff only)
We have a demonstration course now that staff can try out in the role of a student and very shortly we will have a “sandbox” course you can experiment with as a teacher.
The CLT will of course be providing training, assistance and support to all staff who wish to use Moodle.
If you have any queries please do contact us.