Collaboration with Moodle

Our experience at Peace Wapiti School District #76 using open-source software to collaborate online

Outline

Our need to collaborate online. The choice for open source. Moodle

What is it. What does it take to run.

How PWSD uses Moodle. Who is using the site. What does it give us. Why is it a success.

Where are we going from here? Document management. Database consolidation.

Our need to collaborate online.

Simple; Great distance, little time.

Demand for substantive online collaboration beyond email and ftp site’s reached a crisis with several new AISI projects in the spring of 2006.

By Christmas 2006 our first document centered approach based on a for-pay portal had not worked.

The choice for open source

Hype for open source

It slices it dices… The hype for open source

knows no bounds! Check who is using this

piece of technology Check the community- a must! Find support options

Our reasons

Tech bank was broke No upfront fee / no licensing fee We had skills in-house Moodle has a strong and growing

community Many major educational institutions

were experimenting with Moodle

Moodle

An open-source LMS.

What is it?

What does it take to run

Hardware

Software

People

Started on the back of an existing LAMP server at one of our High schools.

Moved in summer to a new small scale server.

OS: chose Red Hat 5 Enterprise Exceptional value for education Allows an additional 5 Virtual Servers

Hardware: 2 x Dual core Opteron 4 GBs RAM

( oodle recommends 50MBs a user) RAID 5 on 10k SATAII drives.

Hardware is light

Software is Open Source OS: anything Web server: Apache Scripting: PHP Database: MySQL or PostgreSQL LMS: Moodle!

But must integrate Authenticates against our

Active Directory Structure Protected by our Tivoli System

Manager

People are key

Technical Server Setup and Support

Administration Site monitoring, navigation and consistency

Team Leaders Learning community builders, people trainers

All the people … Provide the content, make the connections,

create the buzz.

How PWSD uses Moodle

Who is using the site?

Teachers, Administrators, Technicians, and Office staff.

282 real users have logged on and have been using the site since September 2007.

20 Active professional learning committees

Site visits are nearly doubling each month since July 2007 and we are currently receiving an average of 126 visits and almost 5000 hits per day!

SiteLayout

What are the core tools.

File sharing – Drop Boxes Discussion areas – Forums Collaborative documents – Wikis Meeting scheduling – Calendars Personal connection – Blog/Chat

Use has been somewhat surprising. For example we have better scheduling capabilities through exchange, yet groups are choosing to use Moodle’s calendar feature instead.

Teacher Comments

“Collaboration such as we have done is great! In small schools, we often work in isolation. The Moodle site overcomes this problem to some extent”

“Meeting, working and sharing ideas with a large number of math teachers is beneficial in test development. Moodle is an excellent tool for communication. The shared resources allow options within the classroom.”

These are teacher comments from the qualitative questionaire completed in June 2007. The population is the16 teachers from Numeracy Division 4

Where are we going?

Document management

Moodle currently stores files within the local OS file hierarchy.

Difficult to provide multiple expression of the same document.

Too much duplication. Investigating

Microsoft Share Point.

Video Conferencing

Investigating adding synchronous audio and video

ePortfolios

For both staff and students Possible ELGG (Athabasca) or Mahara

Database consolidation

Currently, each Moodle instance has it’s own database.

Other services at our district run on their own databases.

Moodle is Microsoft certified. Move to Microsoft SQL for all of our

districts database needs. Eliminate database overhead from

the current Moodle server.