I’ll follow up on Rick’s declaration that today is open source day (in honour of Alec Couros‘ completing comprehensive exams for his Ph.D.).
Today is a good day to be talking about open source. I just read that there is going to be a cross-campus installation of Moodle at Dublin City University (thanks to Scott Leslie at EdTechPost for the link). Whenever I have looked at Moodle, I always wonder why educational institutions continue to license WebCT or Blackboard. I have heard WebCT described as a programmer’s idea of what an online learning environment should be. Moodle is based on a social constructivist pedagogical paradigm, and was written from the ground up to support that framework.
DCU is to be commended for their thoughtful process in selecting a virtual learning environment. They carefully examined their current and projected needs, then looked at what was available that met their needs. Being an advocate of open source software, I am happy they chose an open source package. Part of their reason for choosing Moodle was obviously the cost (free as opposed to US$75 000 for an enterprise wide deployment of WebCT Vista edition), but another advantage they cite is the avoidance of vendor lock-in. Since Moodle is open source (written in PHP), future enhancements to their deployment could be commissioned at very reasonable rates.
Once DCU has deployed Moodle, they should demonstrate quite effectively that open source software can compete with commercial packages in enterprise level deployments.
And Rick, if you are reading this, I promise to get back to work on the project right away! ;^)
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