Forum .LRN Q&A: Learning from Moodle

Dirk and I attended a presentation of Moodle at the Humboldt University last week, connected with the local sysadmins and some of the users, and were impressed. We think much of what they do might be built into Dotlrn. More importantly, there is a strong user orientation and high level of user community participation that we could only envy. Though, under the hood, their system may not be as powerful as Dotlrn, it is plenty powerful. I am wondering how best to learn from and maybe integrate these systems and communities to our mutual benefit. We might adopt some of Moodle's successful elements, as I list below. We might also consider how to make it easy for users in one group to migrate to another -- and I am thinking in opposition to the one-way, monopolistic policies of commercial systems as I have experienced them, in both directions: not only for data transfer, but in developing a compatible interface design as well. Certainly we have a mutual interest in developing a mutually-supportive user and development community (as an alternative to commercial software): we are learning that all the Berlin universities are dancing with commercial software, but are under terrible cost pressures, and everywhere people are looking to open source solutions. We were gratified that the moodlers welcomed our presence, and we've promised to meet again soon.

So, I'm wondering what experiences/opinions Dotlrners have had with Moodle and what support we might find in our community for such cooperation as I've begun to sketch here.

Here's a quick tour of Moodle links I think relevant.

To start, there is the Moodle Home Page.

From there you might check out the Moodle course syllabus page as it displays course components in a very attractive arrangement by class and with icons suggesting the different kinds of course materials.

The survey page is very clean, and this example features an outline of pedagogical principles they suggest informs the application. Ditto, the attractive formatting of survey results.

I especially like their user-friendly way of explaining open source for those new to the business and think it instructive for both educational and marketing purposes.

The Documentation system is enviable, including a simple, extensible two-pane format. Help for specific components is offered in context-dependent help and written in a way that goes beyond simpy instructions, as in the "upload a file" demo.

The forum features contributor photos that suggest a nice warm, fuzzy, welcoming forum design. New users may find a number of friendly help files explaining how the system works, and this is based on a community members database that speaks clearly to the presence of an active user community. The opportunities to support Moodle are many, including the links to ratings, suggesting a strong grass-roots marketing strategy. The developer's documentation balances developer and user orientation as if all users were part of the developer community. Ditto the FAQ, which offers a fine way into installation and user problem-solving. Finally, at least for this short introduction, there is a very nifty media plugins feature.

At Linuxtag we had a heads on comparison between Moodle and .LRN. There was one sentence which came out in the end that struck me:

"Moodle is like a SMART car, small and suitable for modest needs. .LRN is more like a Unimog, which is large and bulky but can get you everywhere and is adoptable".

<rant>I think we should all read 'the lunatics are running the asylum'.

I haven't looked at Moodle, but it sounds like it has a well-thought out design. We really have to focus on creating quality designs for what people most commonly want to do, and making the computer do the hard stuff. Unfortunately, the needs of the program design and the user design often are at odds, and it takes very careful and creative design to resolve the conflict.

We do have a great architecture, but that doesn't mean anything unless we take advantage of it with a great UI. We're getting better, but really that has to be our primary focus instead of a secondary one.

My grad school advisor used to put it this way: 'It doesn't matter if you have the functionality to do this or that in your program. What matters is if the user can find it before they get too frustrated and give up trying to find it.' I would add thta the user gets frustrated very quickly.
</rant>
We're moving in that direction, though.

By the way, a good example of a web-based UI, IMO, is www.evite.com
It's very well done.

...hopefully ending the header.

Thanks for the query, Matt!
At least in this town, collaboration from one university to another and across systems seems, at least for the moment, to be foreclosed by institutional competition.  My idea was to let a thousand (or at least a few) flowers bloom on my own campus, and on that I think I've succeeded: that we have more than one system available for people of different needs and that we find a way, institutionally, to support people using more than one system and moving from one to another depending on their needs.
The other open question, for me, is how we might learn from the competition, and I'm keen to see how the compelling parts of the Moodle interface might be adapted by Dotlrn to our purposes.  How is it that Moodle has generated such an enthusiastic user base?  How might we do so?
On the question of Dotlrn development: now that much of the work on the "reliability release" of 2.1 has been done, some of us are hoping we can pay more attention to making Dotlrn more user-friendly and to do so, at least in part, by revving up these forums with more discussions of what people would like to see in it, and in this way, build a consensus for new feature lists, revising the Roadmap, etc.  Do you (does anyone?) have enthusiastic users that might enjoy being encouraged to take part in discussing their use of Dotlrn towards the end of improving it?