Bryan Funk E-folio

                As a school district we have an opportunity to re-evaluate our vision for technology and update our technology strategic plan, now in its fourth year.  Specifically the focus needs to be on providing teachers with the best tools to meet all students’ needs.  Our strategic plan was built around the Microsoft SharePoint platform to provide a web portal for staff and students to communicate, collaborate and share documents.  Teachers have struggled with using the cumbersome SharePoint portal to collaborate with each other and in four year students have yet to be given access.  Chickering & Ehrmann (1996) suggest that in order to engage students and to keep them motivated, there must be regular, meaningful contact between teachers and students.  All of our classes are currently delivered face to face, but increasingly teachers are turning to asynchronous communication in the form of email and Blogs to increase opportunities for communication with students and colleagues.   There is a small group of “Lone Rangers” (Bates, 2000) in the district.  These are teachers that have been utilizing web based technologies in an effort to offer some online content for their courses.  At this time an effective infrastructure for providing online learning opportunities in the district does not exist.      It is time for the school district to move to a course management system (CMS) in order to provide more teachers with an effective means of offering blended learning, online learning and improving communication with staff, students, parents and the community. 

                There are examples of schools that use course management systems not only for distance education but also to support regular face-to-face instruction and improve teacher-student communication (Perkins & Pfaffman, 2006).   As an instructional strategy, moving some of the class discussion to an asynchronous forum offers opportunity for students less likely to participate in class to become active and engaged in the discourse. Our teachers have spent much time training in differentiating instruction to improve the learning of all students. There are several CMS’s available that would provide the teachers in our district with the tools necessary to meet the needs of students they teach face-to-face as well as opening an opportunity for the development and delivery of online courses.

Most CMS’s, like Blackboard, are commercial systems and come at a considerable cost.  “LMS systems can cost about $224,000 for 10,000 students during a single year (or about $22 per learner)” (Panettieri, 2007).  Another alternative would be to go with an open-source program such as Moodle.  The  initial cost to the district to have a Moodle server set up by a neighbouring school district and for a year of technical support is $1000.  In a comparison of a commercial system and Moodle using a rubric designed for CMS evaluation (CMS Evaluation Rubric) it is apparent that although there are differences in the products, Moodle can provide most of the same features for a significant cost savings to the district.  A report  from the Learning Management Systems Evaluation committee at University of North Carolina reached the same conclusion.  The LMS evaluation committee states in no uncertain terms

“The evidence gathered by this committee strongly favours a transition to Moodle on both pedagogical and financial grounds.  Moodle provides better or comparable functionality with the benefit of increased relevance and control for what in the long run will be lower cost. (Croy, Smelser and McAlpin, 2009)

Perkins and Pfaffman(2006) also identify Moodle as an effective tool to meeting the educational needs of teachers and students, improving communication among the educational  stakeholders and increasing the achievement of students. 

                Moodle would provide an excellent way for teachers to share plans and resources for units or even whole courses among their district professional learning community (PLC) teams.  Moodle brings all the tools together for teachers to one place and at an affordable cost to the district. It is my recommendation that the school district begin the planning necessary to establish Moodle as the course management system for the 2010 -2011 school year.

Bryan Funk

Course Management System Evaluation

GPPSD

 References

Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers.

Chickering, A.W. and Ehrmann, S.C. (1996).  “Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as Lever,” American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 49(2), p. 3-6.
http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples.htm

Chickering, A.W. and Gamson, Z.F. (1987).  Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.  American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), p. 3-7.
http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples1987.htm

Croy,  Dr. M., McAlpin  Dr. V.  and Smelser,  Dr. R . (2009). Report to the Provost from the Learning Management System Evaluation Committee.  Retrieved 11 Feb, 2010 from http://lmseval.uncc.edu/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_download&gid=39

Panettieri, J. (2007). Addition by subtraction. University Business, August, 58-62. Accessed online February 10, 2010  http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=845

Perkins, M., Pfaffman, J. (2006). Using a Course Management System to Improve Classroom Communication. Science Teacher, 73(7), 33-37.