Proposal
Assignment #2 Project Proposal
John Smith
Superintendent of Technology at School District #73
This is a formal request for some technology to be setup to support students, teachers and parents.
I have been part of a committee that looked at different Learning Management Systems that teachers want to take advantage of. Our research has led us to wanting to have a Moodle server setup. In coming up with this decision we used the SECTIONS Model (Bates and Poole, 2003) to help evaluate the LMS. Our decision was based on appropriate technology for students, ease of use and reliability, cost structure, how it will support teaching, the kind of interaction the technology enables, organizational requirements, how new is the technology, and how quickly can courses be mounted with this technology. The LMS that came out on top was Moodle: it scored far above Blackboard.
Why we believe Moodle is the best choice for a LMS. Our committee concluded that Moodle is the best Open Source platform because:
- Ease of use – from both an administration and faculty point of view
- Has a variety set of resource and activity creation tools
- Many 3rd party modules to extend the students experience
- Growing international community and contributions
As part of our committee’s work, we installed a local version of Moodle in one of the department and were amazed at how easy it was to install and get running. Our computer tech had the system up and running ready to create course content in as little as one day. It is to be noted that he had never setup Moodle before this. So the ease of use and setup can be done quite quickly on an institutional scale.
The only challenges that we see are:
- New versions and patches available almost daily
- Testing (which is why we recommend a quiet rollout)
- New technology for Learning community to learn
But we believe that we can easily handle these challenges with your support.
Because Moodle is Open Source, the costs for purchasing it are negligent. The only costs are going to be around our existing IT department.
The committee strongly urges you to support our faculty and students with a quiet rollout, let’s do it with a slow and add steady growth. This way our faculty and students can become familiar with it.
Sources:
Moodle: Why? Where? When? How? University of Minnesota, 2007. Web. 8 Feb. 2010. <http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/MWR07093.pdf>.