Forum .LRN Q&A: Re: Learning from Moodle
And I think this way of putting it very helpful, and accurate, and relevant for explaining the differences to others. To a couple of users I'd gotten used to variations upon Moodle as "accessible, but thin" vs. Dotlrn as "challenging, but deep, and with a formidable developer base and enormous potential". The problem with that is that my developer friends agree but my non-developer friends haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about -- and they are the ones I am trying to convince to use the thing.
The thing is, I want to learn from Moodle and the rest so that my two cents of opinion to the developer community might actually be worth it, and as I began to list above, I think Dotlrn users can only envy Moodle's user-friendly help system, its simple text editors which allow users to dress up even the simplest messages, and the logical and attractive way it allows you to resent a course syllabus composed of 15 attractively blocked units with the various documents, forums, and links for each class meeting arranged simply and clearly. These elements are immediately grasped by my new users, and they say:
I choose these three because I suspect they are not as expensive to implement as, say, the css/xhtml upgrade some of us have discussed, and yet offer a great return to users: they would be highly visible and immediately useful, tailored to instructor needs, and lead instructors to say "wow", that's something I can imagine putting to good use.
For some developers, I can imagine, this is basic stuff and not so impressive. After all, my early adaptors modify their forum entries and course pages with a limited but powerful set of html commands, and for them a fancy editor is not necessary. But for those not so technically inclined, selecting text and pushing a button for bold is a miracle, and fun, and they want to use it like they have learned to use it in Word -- "intuitive", for them, is "just like I do in Word".
So, I'm hoping that, after the push for the 2.1 release, we might have some energy here to discuss such features in such terms for the next release. I've been searching for a theme to call this little initiative, akin to "The Dotlrn Gardens Thing", maybe something like "The Up-Close and Friendly" theme -- though I don't know what music to set this to, but it's gotta have a a beat, you know, like, ... I'd give it a "7".
Anyone got a better idea?
