From:	Stephen Pruch
To:	Lutz, Todd; Walton, David
CC:	Carrere, Daniel; Escobar, Joe; Keene-Wilson, Meredith
Date:	Tuesday - October 3, 2006 3:45 PM
Subject:	Re: Uses of Moodle for staff and faculty
David, Thanks for the thorough update.  Glad to hear about the success of Moodle. Is it worth considering Fall Term our "transition" term from WebCT courses to Moodle and keeping all of our resources focused on making the transition as successful as possible?  I'm thinking that a new server, a new (well, sort of) CMS, new support issues for the SHed, new support issues for the Faculty Webmasters, et cetera might be enough for one term.  If we can put off other applications until later in the term or even Winter Term, would that give us a greater chance of being successful in the work that we committed to?  There are times for going fast and times for going slow; my intuition is that this is a time to go slow. My understanding of implementations of "group environments" (bb, chat, instant messages, email list, web pages, etc) at other institutions is that they are highly successful and spread quickly to all sorts of natural group uses: departments, student clubs, interest groups, political groups, teams, councils, etc.  I will not be at all surprised if Moodle develops along these lines.  Success will bring other issues and you did a good job of pointing them out: do we have the system capacity, is training and support in place, etc. I'm open to pretty much any outcome, but I see a higher probability of success if we delay expanding use and puts some plans in place first. Thanks, Stephen >>> David Walton 10/03/06 10:25 AM >>> Stephen, This is about another Moodle issue that's been bubbling up--fortunately, this a rather more positive one than what I sent you last night. :-) The faculty webmasters are getting a growing stream of requests to set up Moodle "courses" for administrative purposes.  These range from Pam Farmer, who wants to set up a series of POD trainings, to Mark Williams, who wants to set up a wiki for communicating amongst faculty in CIT, to any number of other examples.  We knew that there would be a demand for this, on a variety of fronts; what we didn't know was just how quickly the demand would escalate.  (It's actually encouraging to see so much interest in using Moodle, especially in light of the grumbling from former WebCT instructors.)   I'd hoped to have a little time to assess these demands for Moodle before we set moved on this front, but the demand is growing quickly, and I think we should consider acting sooner rather than later.  What I propose is that we set up a separate instance of Moodle--basically another copy of the Moodle application, running on the same server, for faculty and staff who want to provide materials directed at other faculty and staff.  We would set that up with the following guidelines: - All faculty, managers and staff will log in with their L-numbers and PINs, just as with our current 'instructional' instance of Moodle.  Unlike the instructional instance, staff will be considered students until they specifically request the ability to create courses and materials (that way, we have a minimal gatekeeping function, and can use that process to inform the content creators what the guidelines are and what kind of support they can expect--and what they can't). - Students will not be allowed access to this instance of Moodle.  The point would be to provide a resource for faculty and staff. - There will be no tie-in to Banner except for providing automatic access via L-number and PIN.  Since the materials here would not be connected to standard courses in Banner, there's no automatic creation of courses, no automatic enrollment, and so forth.  We would be able to use the same mechanism for providing accounts to faculty and staff as we use now--no extra effort would be involved. One concern is of course how much work this would generate for us.  In terms of getting this set up, there's not involved; most everything can use what we're already doing for the instructional instance.  I'm not particularly worried about the load on the server, either: our current server is handling everything without any problems (I have not even begun the process of optimizing the application yet).  The support question is naturally a different kettle of fish, but even there I'm not especially worried (maybe I'm just feeling pollyanish this morning).  I would want to be absolutely clear about how we would support these folks, and the parameters of that support would obviously need to be fleshed out. I imagine that you will have concerns about adding a new set of Moodle clients when we are still resolving issues with our new Moodle setup, and I'm not trying to poo-poo those concerns.  Further, I don't pretend to have even thought of all the issues involved here.  On the other hand, I think this is an issue that probably won't go away, and I think we may be better off if we address it proactively--even if it means jumping in faster than we'd like--than if we wait.  In any event, I'd like to begin the conversation and see what people have to say.  I've cc:d this to the faculty webmasters as well, to include them in the conversation. Thoughts? David ---- David Walton Web/Moodle administration and identity management Information Technology Lane Community College Email: waltond@lanecc.edu Voice: 541-463-3367