Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: interesting chat about moodle / .LRN

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Posted by Rocael Hernández Rizzardini on
All very good posts!

I got to know/talk with the founder of moodle, and got my own conclusions about what we can do to strength .LRN, which are just the same we already posted:

- Strength the community (actually, create it!)
- Quality Assurance for the toolkit
- Make public what's going on in clear / open / easy to find channels
- Improvements for making simply wonderful to use .LRN

But the big question still remains, who's gonna do this? Not the .LRN consortium.
The last resources is the ones that are interested on .LRN, those institutions or companies that care for .LRN?

IMHO, here's is the main functional difference between .LRN & Moodle:
Moodle has one single guy who makes the decisions, for good or bad, this single aspect has brought excellent coordination for stimulating the grow of the community. He's actually the owner of moodle.com, brand, copyright, etc. The project started with one single guy who build an LMS (since he was stuck with webct) and wanted to make it successful for users and for his own good.
But, .LRN, has no father, has no owner, has no one who full-time dedicates to make the things happen. Is about doing the things.

The question still remains, how we can accomplish to have a healthy community? and not just be a developer-feature community.

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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
This is not a winner take all situation, there will not be one winner for all of LMS applications at least not any time soon. We need to be thinking about market share not "Winning".

We have advantages in a number of markets.

Not everyone likes how Moodle looks. We have a more professional and mature look, and its easier to change our look.

We have advantages in large organizations and in corporate learning settings with complicated and customized permissions issues. .LRN is much easier to customize and we already have the excellent permission model they are now needing to put in.

We have advantages if you want to combine your LMS with your outward facing site. This is due to both our permissions models and our CMS and community features.

We have advantages in combined KM, Intranet/Extranet and learning sites.

We have dotFOLIO and Curriculum Central and bug tracker and project manager that can work with .LRN.

We need to communicate these advantages and increase market awareness in the markets that care about these advantages.

I personally think we should not even try to compete with Moodle in their core market of a single teacher downloading and running a few classes. They win there. Let's concentrate on places we can win.

On Moodle's "One Guy is God" governance model: Yes, that’s a good model, but it's not ours. If we play it right we could turn our governance into an advantage in some markets.

There will be big players who will be far more comfortable with a nonprofit consortium governed by clear rules with a clearly defined path for new organizations to become involved and crystal clear decision making structures.

As most of you know clear governance in .LRN is something I've been pushing for it for a while. We need clear, transparent, inclusive and documented governance for .LRN. If we had it it could be a clear advantage for .LRN in important markets.

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Posted by john zhang on
Very good comments.
As a learner of dotLRN (I'm a moodle user already), let me add some things:

1) dotLRN should target 'research' oriented market, with more research utils developped.

2) dotLRN should learn from Moodle in terms of ease use (not the market share). In this postmodern world, no matter how powerful your tool is, if people cannot learn to use it easily, you are dooomed to fail.

Take one simple example, I just installed dotLRN. As an administor, I had hard time figuring out how to let forums in My Space work, cannot add "classes", etc. Without enough patience, even professionals would walk away from wonderful product. Don't think that dotLRN is not well adopted because not enough people dont know it---many people know it. It is just so hard to use it.....