Dear Mr Kerns,
As the West Vancouver District Principal of Technology and Innovation your mandate includes meeting the technological needs of students, teachers, administration and parents. Although we are a leading district in this respect I am sure you will agree that there are always avenues for improvement that we should explore. One such avenue is the adoption of Moodle as a supported Learning Management System (LMS). I propose that this year we support a small group of interested teachers to explore and create companion courses with Moodle. By the end of the school year this pilot group will report on the feasibility of its possible district wide implementation.
Great strides have been taken in recent years to create the West Vancouver School District Portal – inside45. As a fully integrated district portal it performs many tasks and offers many of the supports necessary for a leading edge school district. However, it does fail to meet the needs of the shareholders in one key area – course management.
The current inside45 portal runs on a platform of Microsoft Sharepoint. Designed primarily as a business solution it has a powerful toolset and offers a wide range of functionality. On the other hand, Moodle has been built from the ground up with a pedagogical mindset. Though its overall versatility may not stack up, it is a much more potent and effectual LMS for a number of reasons.
Teacher Centered vs. Student Centered
First and foremost, while courses can be constructed and managed on Sharepoint they are done so in a teacher-centered manner. Materials such as notes and worksheets can be posted and students can submit assignments or perform quizzes. The flow of information is from teacher to student and back again. While it can still offer all of these features, Moodle works in a much more student oriented fashion. In addition to being a repository of information, students are encouraged to learn from each other through discussion forums, wikis and the like. The International Society for Technology in Education (ITSE, 2008) stresses the importance of collaborative and constructivist education by engaging with students in the learning process.
Further research suggests that increased student-teacher and student-student communication and interaction increases both student motivation and participation (Chickering and Ehrmann, 1996). In these respects, while Sharepoint is good, Moodle is great.
Timeframe
Before implementing Moodle in our district we must ask: how quickly can it be up and running and serving the needs of our students? Given that Moodle is free/open source software (FOSS), teachers could download it immediately and begin putting together their courses. It would be reasonable to expect that teachers could have fully functional courses put together by the end of this school year, in time for use in the fall of 2011.
Functionality and Compatibility
As you are aware the implementation of the district portal has been a lengthy process and along the way a number of issues have arisen. For example, the portal still does not support full functionality for Firefox or Chrome users. As a FOSS there are patches available which ensure that Moodle is compatible with all of the major browsers and operating systems.
Open Source vs. Proprietary
It has been argued that educational institutions would be best served by using open source as opposed to proprietary software (Pfaffman, 2008). In the science classroom, for example, OSS models how real science is performed and propagated. Using Moodle to teach science leads students to a better appreciation of how science works.
Costs
No doubt your greatest concern will be the additional costs associated with putting Moodle into practice in our district. Given the current tightening of the budget, for any new technology to be vetted it must come with a low- (or better yet no-) cost price tag. As mentioned before the Moodle platform is free to download. More importantly as FOSS all patches and add-ons as well as any future updates will also be free. Given the cost to purchase, implement and maintain Sharepoint, this is a great deal. That is not to say that there will be no costs whatsoever.
First of all, we require a competent server to host the courses that we create. Fortunately, we already have one in place running our portal. I have been in contact with the districts technical support office and they assure me that with some minor work, our current server is more than capable of hosting Moodle.
This leads to the second cost: technical support. Our technical support staff, though highly capable, are already stretched thin. Teachers will have to build their courses largely without the aid of district technical support. This remains entirely feasible due to the overwhelming amount of support that is freely available online in the form of help documents, forums and videos which fully explain and demonstrate how to take advantage of the wide array of functionalities offered with Moodle. As previously noted, some technical support staff time will be needed to ready the district server. However these relatively minor changes could wait until the spring of 2011 when there are fewer demands on our support staff’s time. In the meantime teachers will still be able to create their courses off-server until it is ready.
The final cost to consider is the time invested by teachers. Given the number of teachers who have already developed course websites, there is clearly a high degree of interest and ability when it comes to creating companion courses. Given the time to explore the features offered by Moodle I am confident that many teachers will choose to put it into practice. In addition to the six professional development days and weekly collaboration time already made available, I would ask for you department’s support in offering release time for the teachers in the pilot group for one afternoon per month to meet and discuss issues.
Conclusion
A great deal of time, effort and money has been put into the current district portal. The superiority of Sharepoint in managing announcements, distributing documents and as an overall intranet framework ensures that these resources have been well spent. We should be careful not to lose site of the ultimate goal – meeting the educational needs of our shareholders. In meeting many of these needs, Moodle may turn out to be a superior system. It is incumbent upon us to explore its many possibilities.
References
Chickering, A. and Erhmann, S. (1996). Implementing the Seven Principles: Technology as a Lever. AAHE Bulletin October 1996. Retrieved October 8, 2010 from http://www.aahea.org/bulletins/articles/sevenprinciples.htm
International Society for Technology in Education (2008), NETS for Teachers 2008. Retrieved October 8, 2010 from
http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-teachers/nets-for-teachers-2008.aspx
Pfaffman, J. (2008) Transforming High School Classrooms with Free/Open Source Software. The High School Journal Feb/March 2008 25-31