In a previous post I wrote about the e-learning platform moodle. Recently I discoverd a podcast by Prof. Dr. Michael Kerres analyzing the success of this platform. Some of the points made there could also be confirmed by interviews I carried out for my diploma thesis. You can find this podcast here.

Kerres explains, that moodle is successful because it supports all of the three user types that use it:

• It is easy to install and handle for system adminstrators
• course authors are able to create a working course environment within a reasonable time
• learners who use the courses get an easy to handle and intuitive environment

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in on subject at 18:58 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software
package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities.”

This short self-description taken from moodle.org illustrates the main idea behind that e-learning platform. It focuses on course management – where a course is an entity and offers a certain learning environment. Those courses can be configured quite openly starting from very basic “courses” were it is only used to provide learning information to learners to quite up to extends where it leads to fully interactive discussions about learning contents and information.

Our university has decided to use moodle as their e-learning software. Since moodle is quite powerful – there shouldn’t be much need for other e-learning solutions. Sadly - Despite this opinion many chairs of the university stick to their isolated applications.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in on subject at 12:47 | Comments (0) | Trackback (1)

It is done – the above topic is the final title for my thesis which will accompany me during the next months. It is a very broad title and includes two possible plots for my thesis. The first includes an interview of users of the Virtual Campus Bamberg (a moodle-powered e-learning platform used by our university). The second is a backup plan in case that there are problems carrying out the questioning, and will focus onto modelling of learning processes and how this processes are supported by social software.

Posted by Jürgen Hösch in on subject at 17:22 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)