The Open University, after commissioning a survey of the alternative/rival LMSs available, has decided to continue using Moodle as it’s primary Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) moving forward and is now planning it’s site wide upgrade which will be a several phase process over the next 12 months according to Ross MacKenzie.
To cut to the chase, we are going to stick with Moodle, and we are planning to use Moodle 2 very significantly closer to its ‘out of the box’ form.
During the summer we commissioned a review of Moodle and a number of possible alternatives in both the commercial and open-source markets, and eventually came to the view that, for the OU, continuing with Moodle was the right way forward. However, we do recognise that we made too many localisations in our adoption of Moodle 1.x – we will be making substantially fewer with Moodle 2.x.
We also guessed, back in the early summer, that Moodle 2 probably wasn’t going to make it out the door until sometime in the Autumn (at the earliest), and we’ve been assuming that there wouldn’t be a proper/stable Moodle 2.0 release until about the turn of the year.
Our plan, at this point, is to have a fairly complete new OUVLE in place in March 2011. This will be based on Moodle 2 and will have most (but probably not all) of the major OU contribs we developed for Moodle 1.x migrated to run in Moodle 2. We’re not intending that this release gets used with our learner community; it will be primarily used for testing, particularly to allow us to be confident that Moodle 2 will be able to carry the load we expect. [link to article]
This is great news for the Moodle community as the OU provides 1000s of open resources all based in Moodle and contributes significantly to the Moodle code base via modules and core changes.
Related posts:
- Open University Joins the Mobile Fray
- Is this the Open University’s Moodle Mobile App?
- Moodle Past, Present and Future (Martin’s Educause Interview)
- 20+ open access college prep courses from the University of California
- MMU Chooses @ULCC for hosting: ULCC users perform 4.5 mm Moodle actions per month!
[...] Joseph Thibault has a new post noting that Open University has chosen Moodle 2.0 as its next LMS. This entry was posted in Open Education and tagged higher education, open source, open university, openness, OU. Bookmark the permalink. ← OER Policy Forum LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]
[...] Nun wird der eine oder andere fragen, was an dieser Nachricht neu ist, denn die Open University arbeitet doch schon seit Jahren, genau genommen seit 2006, mit Moodle. Völlig korrekt, doch diese Wahl stand jetzt auf dem Prüfstand. Mit guter Nachricht für Moodle: “During the summer we commissioned a review of Moodle and a number of possible alternatives in both the commercial and open-source markets, and eventually came to the view that, for the OU, continuing with Moodle was the right way forward.” Warum die Nachricht für die weitere Entwicklung von Moodle wichtig war, zeigt ein Blick auf die Liste der weltweit größten Nutzergruppen. Joseph Thibault, Moodle News, 22. November 2010 [...]