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As more and more organisations look to take advantage of the flexibility offered by online training and education, there are an increasing number of platforms - some called learning management systems, some called virtual learning environments - available to organisations to choose from. These platforms offer an online environment in which training and education can take place, incorporating a variety of learning tools.

From a range of alternatives, Moodle (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment) has become favoured by many private and public sector organisations. Moodle is unique in the market because it is an opensource system (which means the system is primarily developed by a large community of volunteers, and it is not company owned). Moodle has been successful in building a reputation for being a reliable, flexible and intuitive system. This is demonstrated by some large and reputable names choosing to use Moodle . These include private sector companies such as Google, higher education institutions including the Australian National University and Open University UK (250 000 students), and multinational institutions like the World Bank.

The widespread uptake of Moodle can be explained by a couple of factors.

First, because it is an opensource system, Moodle does not require any software or licensing fees. This is immediately appealing for companies with tight training budgets or for those who are wanting to dabble in online learning for the first time. Of course nothing is ever truly free, and while Moodle itself may not incur a cost, there is still a price associated with hosting such a system, including server space and adequate technical support. For some organisations, these costs are kept in-house, using existing infrastructure and skills to host Moodle. Other organisations choose to outsource the hosting of Moodle to companies with expertise in this area. However, even when keeping these associated costs in mind, Moodle usually comes out ahead for most organisations from a financial perspective when compared with company licensed products. While the financial advantages of Moodle are well known, it is the educational quality and flexibility of the product which underpins the wider appeal of the system.

Moodle works as a 'modular object' based platform, which in plainspeak means it provides a simple platform from which a wide range of learning tools or 'objects' can be plugged-in. The standard Moodle platform comes with an array of these tools, but there are also hundreds of extra tools which you can download (or build yourself) from the Moodle community website (http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6009). This means that organisations can tailor Moodle to their own needs, creating a platform for: communication; accessing learning materials; and richer learning experiences including quizzes, wikis and multimedia learning tools. This dynamism is one of the core reasons why Moodle stands out from some of the more generic platforms.

Moodle is an evolving platform, with regular updates and a lively community continually creating new tools to respond to the latest technological advancements and educational demands. For example, a plug-in has already been created to allow Google Wave (Google's 'next big thing' which incorporates a new approach to email, instant messaging and document sharing in a single platform) to be integrated into Moodle, even though Wave is still only a beta Google product. This kind of development and responsiveness to the users' technical and educational needs is simply unparallelled by company owned products. While opensource products are sometimes considered risky due to their reliance on a community of mainly volunteers, Moodle appears to have reached a threshold whereby it is now a serious player in the online learning market, with some unique and enviable characteristics.

Posted by Peter Yates at 02:38 PM | Permalink

Various forms of ICT based collaboration are more the norm these days, but especially with the wide range of low cost web-based services available, there is also skepticism in some quarters on cost/benefit of high quality video conferencing services. Among the arguments: VC infrastructure is costly; Video quality is often not good enough to substitute for a face to face meeting; If you really want to see a video of the person, why not use skype.? etc.

This report published by the Aberdeen Group http://www.aberdeen.com/about_us/ provides some valuable insights. It provides a brief overview of VC technology including telepresence, and presents the results of a survey of some 170 enterprises (including public sector) conducted last year. The research tries to correlate the performance of these enterprises within their own spheres with the use of VC or other ICT based collaboration tools. The most striking statistic: 82% of enterprises that were ranked "best in class" were effective users of virtual meetings and meeting collaboration tools. This contrasts with 63% of enterprises that were ranked as "Industry average" using these tools. The best companies also ensured that nearly all staff had access to these tools on their desk tops.

The full report is accessible on the Aberdeen web site.http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/5566-RA-telepresence-videoconferencing-enterprise.asp

 

Posted by Ravi Corea at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Internet has changed the way knowledge is created and shared, immeasurably, but the processes of academic research and publication have still to take full advantage of Web 2.0. 

I recently got involved in formal research after a gap of many years and the advances were immediately noticeable. Most publications are readily accessible via the Internet and, very quickly, a large knowledge bank is assembled on your computer, as files and as URL links. Yet the output is still commonly published as a plain document. Electronic access to that knowledge bank is consequently lost. Most papers are then published on the web, but all too often as PDFs for download. References in the text are as they always were, formal citations, usually leading to a bibliography at the end.

What if the same document were published as a Wiki page (or pages)? A simple change, but the references could lead directly from the text to the source and the bibliography would do likewise. Instead of a "paper" the same material would now become a valuable part of an interlinked, authoritative web of knowledge; easily referred, easily verified. Most important - it would provide an excellent platform for peer review and discussion.

Today, creating Wiki pages is no more complicated than Word Processing and there are many providers that operate free or quite inexpensive services. The Wikipedia provides a straightforward and effective format that is familiar to academics, which could be the basis for developing a new web format for academic publications. Here's an example, where the outcome of a literature review has been turned into a set of Wiki pages, in almost the same format as the original paper. http://linkasea.pbworks.com/2-Youth-in-the-Pacific

We could go even further with a Wiki: if the author were to allow it, peer review might extend to peer contribution, short-circuiting the somewhat cumbersome process where publication and/or public presentations at conferences are the main methods of interaction, supplemented by personal communications (as they were well before the Internet). If published on a Wiki, authors whose work was referenced would have the chance to respond directly and early. So would other researchers in related areas. With the fine-grained control available today, it would be simple to implement editorial policy, with some people allowed to "comment" as in a blog while others may be trusted to edit, and yet others, perhaps, trusted to edited without moderator intervention. The interaction between academics, students, industry and the interested public could become much more dynamic and meaningful. And the "paper" would become just the starting point of a real knowledge source that has the potential to be continually updated as long as there are people interested in the topic.

Posted by Ravi Corea at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)