There are four faculty members in our Moodle pilot group this term. They’ve been charged with the task of using some or all of the Moodle features and helping our campus decide if Moodle is worth pursuing further.

One of the attributes of this pilot program is that no integration work has been done to sync enrollments in Moodle with class rosters in Banner. I’ve had to manually import users and assign them roles in each Moodle course. This isn’t too bad when done in bulk using a CSV file, but when students are still adding and dropping classes it is a bit cumbersome. I can see that this roster sync will be at the top of my list if we stay on board with Moodle next term.

A couple of our faculty have already had their students working in Moodle, submitting assignments and accessing course resources through the Moodle course instead of our traditional MyIWU course tools. The others are working with their courses a little further before bringing the students in. I haven’t seen anyone make use of the gradebook yet, nor have there been any quizzes (this is the first week of classes, so a quiz could be seen by students to be an act of war).

I’m thrilled with the look and content of our active courses. They look as good as any I’ve seen from other institutions. I’m looking forward to hearing about student response – either way they go, I’d like to present a summary of our experiences sometime next year.