Hi all,
I sat down and took some time to look at Moodle today. For those of you
who don't know, Moodle is a free, open sourced program that's designed
to allow a website to offer online courses, just like Blackboard or
Chalk. It has an impressive number of features, including the ability to
manage massive numbers of students, instructors, and courses, and seems
to offer full email -> forum integration (something I haven't managed to
get working in Drupal yet, annoyingly enough).
Why should you care?
I think Moodle could revolutionize efforts to bridge the Digital Divide.
If it's truly as easy to use as it seems (and I've seen nothing to
contradict this assumption so far), then this is a package that *any*
community technology organization could, and should, be using.
Consider this: say we have a group of 50 community technology groups
across a city. One of them has a staff member who's skilled in search
engine optimization, but the organization desperately needs some help in
developing a sustainability plan. Another may have good fundraising
efforts in place, but offers only basic computer literacy courses...and
doesn't know where to send their students when they ask for more
involved instruction, for example in website design. A third
organization has a wealth of experience in community outreach and
development and holds advanced classes in digital video editing, but
lacks the capacity for developing basic literacy courses for ESL
populations.
What I'm describing is pretty much the status quo of the community
technology field. We have tremendous resources in our network, of which
knowledge is perhaps the most important. We also suffer from serious
drawbacks, since very few organizations have a perfect mastery of every
area needed for a successful program.
If these organizations had a centralized online system for coursework,
however, we can see some major potential for change in this model.
Consider an organization that is considering adding a website
development course to their offerings. How much easier would it be to
implement if this organization could simply have a staff member take an
online course in website development and then in teaching website
development, while offering the same online website development course
to students in a lab, with the newly trained staff member as a course
instructor / facilitator? Instead of developing their own curriculum,
they'd have access to curricula developed by several experienced
organizations to draw from. Similarly, their staff members would go from
having relatively few opportunities for professional development to
having multiple courses available to them at any given time, on a
variety of topics. Courses can also be controlled, so participation can
be limited to members affiliated with a partner institution, or those
who've paid a sliding scale fee, for example. In the event of a highly
successful program, courses could even be provided for corporate or
other participants willing to pay commercial rates for training, which
would be a welcome stream of income. Courses could be used as-is, or
used as the basis for a classroom course in a specific area...for
example, a CTC in Dhaka could use a course on website development as an
accompaniment to a classroom course taught in Bangla on the same subject.
This has implications for how we conduct our workshops and training
sessions, too. If I'm leading a panel discussion on search engine
optimization, for example, I can reach a fairly limited audience. How
many more people can I reach if I've developed that same content into an
online course, which any participating institution can make available to
its members? How many organizations are thinking "sure, we could use a
staff member training in search engine optimization, but we can't
justify the staff time to send someone out during the day" ...but would
gladly have staff members participating if the workshop were online,
self-scheduled?
As organizations in the field of education, our network is in a position
to benefit from Moodle in a big way, both in terms of directly working
with our constituencies and in professional development for staff and
volunteers. We need systems like this in place to really establish our
work as a field, and to begin to tap the potential already hiding in
various pockets of our network.
Anyone using Moodle already? Other ideas, comments, suggestions?
Dave.
-------------------
Dave A. Chakrabarti
Projects Coordinator
CTCNet Chicago
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(708) 919 1026
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