Seeing Moodle in action has been a pretty eye-opening experience. Having used Blackboard and similar products both as a student and instructor, I had developed a pretty poor opinion of most educational management systems. The chief issues were always: poor organization, non-intuitive interface, and the system never having the 'perfect' tool for the job at hand.
The standard Moodle interface using a weekly chronological format was the first major improvement. Far too often in other systems, items are thrown in as the class progresses, which leads to a confusing sea of links. Also, Moodle uses a very 'flat' design scheme, preventing many of the 'click-chains' that can develop in other systems in order to get things done.
I showed the Moodle site to several of my students, and the 'friendliness' of it was by far the most common item noted. Simplicity will almost always trump byzantine complexity, and none of the people I polled had any issues seeing where to go to accomplish their goal.
At first, Moodle seemed to be roughly equivalent in the tools capacity. Quite often, I found myself wishing for different or expanded functions to get my work done more efficiently. But my research showed me that the open-source community had already come up with quite a few of the tools I had wanted. Not every tool I envisioned was extant, but the extensible nature of the system suggests that nearly anything would be possible with the right know-how behind it.
In reference to media I would recommend with Moodle, it is really dependent on the situation. There are way too many variables to indicate whether a given media strategy would be effective or not. For my course, if I had been able to modify my instructor station's software, I would have loved to do screen recordings of my in-class lectures/demonstrations. Students would only lose the ability to get synchronous feedback, which would be mitigated by their ability to rewatch tricky sections.
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