What impressed me about moodle was that a lot of the posts on their forums were from teachers who had tried moodle out for one or two courses themselves and now wanted to get it adopted by their school. These teachers were often from high schools or smaller colleges in addition to the larger outfits. I remember being pleasantly surprised (back before there was a Windows OACS/.LRN installer) that I could install it on my Windows machine and try it out. (It was not a one step process but the instructions were pretty simple.) Certainly, if I was a teacher I could have gone on to set up my course and syllabus from there. Also their community seemed to support doing small things well such as creating a pdf "certificate" for a course, useful for training courses, three day seminars, etc. In contrast, more of the news on the forums here is about the "integration" of new features.
In clicking on the example sites, however, I usually found they all looked about the same (dull), and it didn't seem that easy to modify the appearance other than basic changes like the "theme". I guess that might have changed judging from Malte's initial post.
BTW, I personally prefer the look of OACS's forums, but perhaps in some academic settings people like the funny faces, i.e the smileys, tiny portraits etc.
I guess I don't think of .LRN as being in the same space as .LRN seems geared toward the problems of large institutions like Sloan. For example, I think Mark Dalrymple teaches some Big Geek course (or something like that). Would it be appropriate (or do they) use .LRN for that?
