The team have been working over the past few weeks to bring together all the feedback and comments the VLE has generated.  We thought this would be a good time to share some of those points.

The review has captured views of staff and students in a variety of ways and this has been a very interesting process for all those involved.  You will recall we have undertaken a number of events which included focus group style sessions with academics to see what would be important in the future Edge Hill VLE, the most important teaching and learning tools they would want to use, a comprehensive staff survey to allow for further comment and then the  presentation event 3 weeks ago.

The event showcased..warts and all..both Blackboard and Moodle.  Here are some of the staff comments:

Blackboard..the good

Familiarity

Drag and Drop

Professional look and feel

The migration wouldn’t seem problematic

Navigation intuitive

365/24/7 support

Selective release of content

More organised

Empty folders don’t show in student view

Blackboard…not so positive

Speed of student down loads

Add-ins have to be paid for

Technical issues still exist ie Java

Moodle…the good

Use of communication with announcements pushed to email

Forums

Linear

Looks easy, similar design to Google

Intuitive

Looks as if its more interactive

No Java used

Moodle..the not so good

Busy/cluttered

Wordy

Too many boxes

Looked dull

Seems complex

Linear

No selective release

Migration

The afternoon was very useful for all those involved and the comments from staff are very important but of course not everyone could attend and we did only see a small snap shot with the perspective of those two universities.  Testing will help tease out some of the detail behind all the comments above

The next stage is to have a sand pit/play area where we will have sample courses set up will be asking staff to get involved in testing out the main functions and adding content.  As soon as this is ready we will let everyone know and try to get staff and students from all our faculties involved.

Please post your views if you were at the event or want to get involved in the sand pit.

One response to “The Story So Far….”

  1. Blackboard..the good

    The migration wouldn’t seem problematic – It really won’t be as plain sailing as they make out.

    Selective release of content – forms of this are available in Moodle by the way of Groupings, Roles, Start/End dates, Conditional Activities etc. etc.

    Moodle..the not so good

    Busy/cluttered, Wordy, Too many boxes, Looked dull – Because it’s Moodle it’s look and feel can be changed to how we want it to be. This will enable us to have a much more positive user experience for our own staff and students rather than the cookie cutter approach taken by a monolithic centrally hosted system like Blackboard.

    Moodle the good, in my opinion:

    Hosted internally means it can be tightly integrated with the student experience.
    Moodle is open source, tying that with hosting it internally gives us the chance to develop custom features, and tweak existing ones to work best for Edge Hill. This simply wouldn’t be possible with Blackboard. We already have the development skills in house because we use the same language that Moodle is built with internally.