The purpose of this proposal will be to try and recommend the learning management system (LMS), Moodle, to the Headmaster of a private boarding school to replace the locally designed LMS that is currently being used. First I would like to discuss the current LMS that is being used called the Shawnigan Intranet. The Intranet was designed in 2001 as LMS’s were just becoming popular in educational institutes. The purpose was to provide each teacher with a space where they could organize information and documents for each of their classes. Over time, the Intranet developed more characteristics of a proper LMS with a space for web links, blogs, wikis, a drop box and the aforementioned file storage area. Furthermore, the Intranet is tied to a database called “photodex” which provides information and images for each student at the school and in each class. While many teachers have made good use of the Intranet in their teaching there are many drawbacks that could be improved with the implementation of Moodle. In selecting Moodle over our current LMS I tried to focus on the following points: encouraging contact between students and faculty, having staff provide prompt feedback (Chickering and Gamson, 1987), effect on students, speed of implementation, and cost (Bates and Poole, 2003).
Perhaps the best way to improve the contact between our staff and students would be to have a real time chat function on the class sites. The current Intranet does not provide this tool and; therefore, takes away a major opportunity to do online tutorials between staff and student and produce collaborative constructivist work amongst students. Moodle’s designer, Martin Dougiamas built this LMS with social constructivist pedagogy in mind (Wikipedia, 2011). Constructivist pedagogy has been a major focus at our school recently, and if we are serious about its implementation then we need to provide our teachers with an LMS that facilitates this. This can also be another way to make students more accountable for the work assigned to them (Perkins & Pfaffman, 2006). Moreover, there is also an accountability aspect built in for staff and the speed at which they are able to provide feedback. With assignments being submitted in one spot and the ability to make comments and return the work in the same spot, Moodle would present a massive upgrade over the current drop box function that does not provide for anything other than a place for students to upload a file to be received by the instructor.
Focusing on the effect that Moodle would have on our students, one of the components of the SECTIONS model (Bates & Poole, 2003), an upgrades to our current system would be the ability to have our students think more globally versus locally. Currently our Intranet is a local network, where the students’ blogs are only shared on our system. Part of this is for security and privacy reasons; however, it takes away a key aspect of teaching our students both digital and real life citizenship skills that they can develop by having their work and discussion shared with other students around the world.
Furthermore, Moodle deals with the issue of speed much better than our current model as it is open-sourced. Currently, if a teacher wants to make a change to the design, layout or order of any of their class pages, they need to go through the IT department, and even then it is usually unattainable as it would mean rewriting the design for all of the classes. Over the years w have found that getting all teachers to agree on one design or layout is next to impossible. Therefore, changes and editing can be done much faster when each teacher is in charge of their own open-sourced coding. While this may seem daunting, the user-friendly interface of Moodle would be learnt fairly quickly. Certainly any time that would be saved in writing the lines of code that are currently needed for our system could be put toward helping teachers get started on Moodle.
Moreover, the issue of cost is probably the most enticing reason to make the switch from our current LMS to Moodle (Bates & Poole, 2003). As Moodle is free and open-sourced, the overhead on the software is nothing. This has always been one of the main reasons that our current LMS was built – so we would not have to pay companies for any rights or licensing. However, I do expect that there will need to be a budget for man hours that will be required to a) transfer over existing information and files from our current system and b) to educate our staff on how to use Moodle. This could be a big task and may cost a lot of money if this task fell simply on the shoulders of our IT department. However, it would be much more manageable if it was handed over to each individual teacher. Before this task could be undertaken it would still require an approximately two hour workshop to educate all of the staff at once. Beyond this, the amount of time currently allocated to the IT department to deal with our current Intranet’s problems could be transferred over to dealing with the growing pains of each new teacher’s individual learning of the Moodle system. A final thought on budget would be that some of the cost of educating the staff on Moodle would be offset in a savings from the use of paper. The ability to do online testing would cut back substantially on both paper and photocopying budgets, which have been estimated to be in the $100,000 dollar range.
Finally, a few other system management points that Moodle would make more efficient for our school would be the merging of our email, grades and calendar onto one system. Currently we use three different programs and while some of these are embedded in our current Intranet, they are still cumbersome to have to switch from one program to the next in order to operate.
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 Gamson, Z.F. (1987). Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. American Association for Higher Education Bulletin, 39 (7), p. 3-7.
Martin Dougiamas. (2011, June 4). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 07:25, June 9, 2011, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Dougiamas&oldid=432487630
Perkins, M., Pfaffman, J. (2006). Using a Course Management System to Improve Classroom Communication. Science Teacher, 73(7), 33-37.