Moodle : Fall 04 surveys

As a consequence of the March 22^nd 04 meeting of ITPC Moodle version 1.3 was installed on a dedicated server (Sunfire x.x) in ECS in August 2004. A small number of faculty were informed that it was available, but news spread rapidly and by the middle of the semester 26 faculty had courses on the Moodle system [link]. At the end of the Fall semester I carried out surveys of faculty and students using the online Free Assessment Summary Tool (FAST) to ascertain experiences using Moodle with a class:

• What were teaching faculty views of Moodle?
• What did their students think of Moodle?
• How did students who were using both Moodle and Chef rate each of them?

Why did teaching faculty take to Moodle so quickly and in such numbers? An email message from Tom Kirk to the mitc-cms mailing list on 7^th December throws some light on this question.

Until 2003-04 we had been using no CMS for the undergraduate program. Our seminary, Earlham School of Religion, had been using the basic version of Blackboard but there was almost no carryover to the undergraduate faculty [at Earlham College]. In 2003-04 we implemented Chef and Moodle in an experimental mode with just a handful of faculty. In the second semester our Information Technology Policy Committee wrestled with the question which should be our choice. For reasons that are complex we "delayed the decision" and said we would continue with both. We were using MITC's instance of Chef and had loaded Moodle locally. We planned to continue experimenting with the two but had no takers on Chef and a deluge of faculty adopted Moodle. Fully a third of our FTE faculty are using Moodle for one or more courses.

What we note is that faculty have chosen Moodle because it addresses a specific felt need. They have not started using Moodle because it is a new scheme for including technology nor to revolutionize their teaching. Put simply they choose Moodle because it addressed a specific course management problem:

1. central repository for course documents,
2. electronic reserve (the library doesn't have an electronic reserve system),
3. a mechanism for centralized assignment submission to name three.

Faculty have typically not adopted Moodle for multiple reasons Of course any of these functions could have been done carried out without Moodle given existing services (except perhaps the electronic reserves although a few faculty where using password protected web pages as a way to provide electronic versions of copyrighted material).

What appears to have happened is that faculty had become comfortable enough with basic tools and had developed a need for additional tools to handle a specific course management issue. Moodle was easy to learn to use and implement. We held some informal workshops and individual training sessions and adoption took off. We will hold additional workshops this December. I predict that once faculty have used Moodle to address the specific challenge they were trying to address they will begin to explore the other functionalities of Moodle and will expand the range of uses of Moodle.

Why the rapid adoption? Presented as solution for specific problems so that they saw the time saving feature. Didn't ask them to make major investment in time to learn. If they have used listservs, mail attachments, central storage servers and configured personal homepages on, for example, Yahoo, then use of Moodle is pretty straight forward. Furthermore the Moodle interface is easy to understand.