Hello WebCT-using faculty,

We are your faculty webmasters and wanted to contact you as soon as possible after the announcement from ET and OISS appeared in The Daily about the LMS decision.

In case you missed it, here it is in brief.

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LCC Executive Team approves faculty choice of Moodle as the officially supported college LMS

The Executive Team and Office of Instruction has approved the faculty-led decision to move to Moodle as the only funded and officially supported Learning Management System at Lane Community College, beginning Fall Term 2006.  

In short:
    * Lane will officially adopt Moodle as the LMS of choice, to begin Fall Term 2006.
    * Lane will cease it's use of WebCT, whose license expires in September, by the start of Fall Term 2006.
    * Moodle will be supported by Lane's IT department on both the technical server end and student support end.
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This sort of college-wide decision is guaranteed to produce some level of anger and frustration.  There are 38 WebCT and 69 Moodle instructors currently at Lane.  There were bound to be either 38 or 69 instructors dissatisfied with decision of the Executive Team.

Considering our current budget crisis, there are bound to be more of these frustrating types of decisions coming our way.  As your faculty webmasters, we want to focus on the positive things over which we have control.  

We have a large amount of control over the WebCT to Moodle conversion process, including both training affected faculty on the new system and aiding them in making the conversion from their existing classes.  Take these two examples.

First, we think the training component will not be that difficult for faculty already using an LMS.  Of course, there is a familiarity component.  It took many of you a long time to develop a mastery of the WebCT interface itself.  The Moodle interface is different, but essentially, the two programs can do the same things.  And we think it will be easier to go from one "system" to another.  Most of you want from "no system" to WebCT.  That is a much more difficult learning curve.  Realizing that "discussions" in WebCT are called "forums" in Moodle is not that tough.

Second, there exists a WebCT to Moodle conversion script which will take a backup of your WebCT course and automatically turn it into a Moodle course.   The process is not perfect, of course.  There will be a varying amount of re-organization involved, but it beats starting from scratch.  Items like quiz banks have transferred rather nicely.

There are items related to the LMS decision and conversion over which we faculty webmasters have no control, and you should know that also.
 
First, we do not hold the purse strings of the college, so cannot answer your requests for funding for the work involved in converting your courses.  ET is aware that this is an issue, if not the top issue for faculty.

Second, we are here to help you make the conversion, not to do it for you.  We are faculty members at Lane, not support staff.  We cannot spend time arguing the ET decision or lobbying for Lane to provide curriculum development funds.  

Third, we are not able to support two LMS systems at Lane.  Faculty webmasters are paid for in both hard money and soft money.  In this budget crisis, the soft money is "going away" and we will experience a 25%-50% cut in our funding and ability to help Lane instructors with educational technology.  The good news is that this cut won't occur until Fall Term 2006, when most of you have been retrained and courses converted.  The other good news is that we will have only one LMS to support.  


This letter is the first of a few communications we expect to send directly to you as a WebCT instructor.  We will be outlining what support we plan to offer you in this transition period.

We will do anything of a practical nature to aid you in your work, including providing dual monitor computers in the ITC so that you can open your WebCT course on one screen, your Moodle class on the other screen, and show you how to copy and paste between the two.  We'll offer workshops specifically for WebCT users throughout Spring Term.  We'll provide help via phone and email, seven days a week.  We'll meet with you at your office and can "meet" with you over the phone when we both have access to a internet-connected computer.  We can have these "meetings" on Saturdays and Sundays if this best for your schedule.

Don't hesitate to contact us at our common email box.
online@lanecc.edu

P.S.

The good news for Fall 2006, based on this past Fall Term, is that only 16 instructors and 18 fully online classes need to be trained and converted to Moodle during the Spring and Summer Terms.