At Athabasca, an exclusively distance/open university, we use Moodle as our primary learning delivery and management platform. Most of our undergrad courses are individualized so I am unable to make use of the chat and discussion features. However, the blog in Moodle was so poor that I had to change my assignment. Moodle, like most open source software, cannot just be used and adopted easily without a high level of technical expertise. We have teams of IT professionals customizing it before it is ready for student and faculty use. In the future we expect some kind of integration with elgg, as we have one of its main developers on faculty with us from the UK. Rhiannon Dr. Rhiannon Bury Assistant Professor Women's and Gender Studies Athabasca University (Canada's Open University) rbury@athabascau.ca ________________________________ From: Ted Coopman <ted.coopman@gmail.com> To: Graham Meikle <graham.meikle@stir.ac.uk> Cc: "air-l@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Sent: Fri, August 13, 2010 10:47:08 AM Subject: Re: [Air-L] Examples of Successful Uses of Facebook in the Classroom? All, We just switched from Blackboard to D2L - both suck in unique ways and are (IMO) highly ideological in how they think you should teach and time consuming to work with. Of course, my institution's lack of meaningful tech support and banker's hours are also issues. I just can't rely on it being up and functional 24/7. I have head good things about Moodle, but I can't understand why education LMS is so crappy in that 1997 Microsoft kind of way. U of Washington has its own system that was pretty user friendly which is only great of you work there. As a rule, I use LMS for grades, quizzes, discussion boards (for all online classes), and to post copyrighted materials. I use a combination of pbworks (edu version is ad free and my University did pop for the enhanced version) and Google Groups for the list function (sign-up is on the pbworks page). These are reasonable innocuous, easy to use, and dependable. FB is a good platform for students to use is they choose for research projects or to study as media topic, but I find their privacy policies problematic enough that I would not force students to use it. -TED