Moodle Pilot
The Curriculum Design Group is significantly involved in the Moodle implementation project at CQUni. This page will be used to document and track any issues that arise from our involvement in the project.
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Feature comparison issues between blackboard and moodle
Surveys
The vanilla Moodle install comes with predefined question sets that can't be altered which isn't very useful in our context. There are a couple of add-in modules that are available to produce this functionality. http://docs.moodle.org/en/Survey_module_FAQ
Online Study Guides (Webfuse)
The online study guides (estudyguides) that are produced automatically by CDU and hosted on webfuse do not fit the topic/week structure of Moodle. The estudyguides are separated into chapters/modules and all hosted on the one page with a brief title and description of each. In moodle, it is likely that many academics will wish to have each of the module/chapters located under the topic or weekly groupings. This will mean that the value of the webfuse approach is diminished. Ideally, it would be beneficial to be able to automate the creation of the estudyguides and import into the moodle grouping so the academics do not need to do this laborious and time-consuming task themselves. Something ITD could cater to.
Hierarchical course structures
Blackboard allows courses to be structured hierarchically, and arbitrarily. While moodle has a more rigid structure of weeks or topics by default. Going outside this approach requires that you create HTML pages to support your interface. While there is a wysiwyg HTML editor provided, it did require some direct HTML coding to make more complex interfaces work. This was very time consuming.
Interface Customisation
- Mouse-overs limited. The ability to create mouse-over text bubbles is desired. It should be as simple as adding JQuery to the style sheets.
- Everything links off the main page. This adds complexity to the migration process. Most of the Blackboard sites use some sort of hierarchical structure that has to be flattened for Moodle.
- Blocks background colour is so dark you can't easily make out the icons. There is no confirmation on delete which could cause issues.
- Most/many of the popups (contextual help) open at half the width of the fixed witdth content. I suspect these popups are using the CQU styles (for the content container) which is making them fixed width and too big for the popup by default. Recommend adding a "popup" class to <body> of popups with a style allowing variable width (width="auto" or width="99%")
Adaptive Release
The adaptive release model under blackboard allows a co-ordinator to specify a date/time to make content available ahead of time. Under moodle, it is possible to make content hidden, but not schedule its release.
Online Assignment Submission
Quizzes
Importing into Moodle from a question pool that was exported from Blackboard doesn't work. According to Moodle Docs it should. http://moodle-playpen.cqu.edu.au/moodle/help.php?module=quiz&file=import.html&forcelang=en_utf8
Blackboard Documents
Staff only areas
Files
The process of moving all of the course files from Blackboard to Moodle is slow and error prone. My suggestion is for an automated process that moves the files into the courses so they are already in Moodle when the academic constructs the course.
Group Space
The trainer confirmed that Bb Group Space functionality has no parallel functionality in Moodle. This is a major draw back. Successful learning designs such as ACCT19064 makes use of group space functionality quite heavily. How would this be managed in Moodle?
- For the time being, group space could perhaps be handled by creating a meta course and have "child courses" as group spaces. Might be worthwhile to explore this further.
Lesson
This is an activity tool that has enormous potential for student-centred learning... Nona is noting this here as a point for reflection about possible professional development sessions for academics around Moodle feature-specific learning design ideas.
Other functionality
- The RSS feeds out of the discussion boards dont appear to be working.
- The meta course mechanism needs to be looked at. It was favourably received by the academics in my training course
- Javascript chat function doesn't seem to work.
- By default emails can't be sent to groups. We often have different teaching staff for campuses etc so this need to be looked at.
- Need to confirm varios tool options - which buttons will be available, several mentions have been made of "if your setup has it". I suspect defaults will be used, something training will need to take into account
- Backups. Perhaps daily course backups separate to enterprise backups for staff to recover lost data. Typically there is no confirmation of deletion withing Moodle. This might help http://docs.moodle.org/en/Backup_settings or maybe not http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=119059
- The online users block isn't user configurable. ie they cant delete it.
- clicking Delete X button generally on items does NOT ask for confirmation, look at using JQuery to unobtrusively put in a "Are you sure" popup : $('a.editing_delete').click(function(){return confirm('Are you sure you want to delete this item?');});
- Page layout - look at removing completely the right nav block, with a fixed width page it takes too much space - or, make it completely optional on a course by course basis
- Topic or weekly headings with carriage returns. The text overlaps. CSS issue.
- The staff in our training group were adamant they wanted announcements functionality similar to Bb. Perhaps the news forum top 2 or 3 posts to appear at the top. eg exam cancelled due to cyclone.
