OK, so I’ve had a look through our four LMS options, gone to their sites, watched the videos, and now I’m sitting here trying to decide on one. Before tonight I was certain it was going to be Moodle because it’s my old friend from the past. I really liked the clean, uncluttered page layout with the blocks showing on the sides and weeks (topics) in the middle. The ability to open only the current week while seeing the others provided a wide view of all content options. I especially liked the ‘recent posts’ and “online” blocks, which again were visible without leaving the main page. My only reservation with Moodle is that I plan to use my experience in 565A to inform an LMS decision for the blended course I’m teaching at my school in September. The rub is that the Vancouver School Board determines an administrator on a first come first serve basis, and a colleague with little interest or skills in technology scooped that title for my school at a ProD day (that sounds petty, I know, but all I see is problems).

Connect is a non starter because I have yet to hear a positive review of it from fellow MET classmates, instructors or in the press. It seems to be the grand daddy monolith of them all, and I get the sense from the documentation that it is difficult to navigate. I have to admit that the Spiro article about the impending death of learning management systems is nudging me towards EdX and Eliademy. Many thanks to Pam, who has already done the tutorial course on EdX and has an excellent review of it on the May 20 entry of her blog. I’m setting aside tomorrow night to do the same. My concern is BC’s  FOIPPA laws and the fact that the data would be on US servers (is this right? can’t tell with the Edge version).

I leaning towards Eliademy. I’m a sucker for clean design after years of trauma with D2L, and who doesn’t love the Finns? It’s functionality seems like a good fit for a secondary blended course, allowing for text and multimedia content, discussions and a quiz options. So tomorrow, I’m going deep on the new open source options and making a decision. I’m interested to hear what considerations or observations that anyone else has had so far.