Hello Lane instructors and staff,

I would like to personally thank you for attending the Moodle presentation this past Monday, January 30th.  I certainly enjoyed my trip out to Oregon, but am back at home in North Carolina, back at school, and busy dealing with the students in my classes once again.

If you gained anything from the presentation, I hope it was a clear understanding that Moodle serves as an open source example, with no licensing costs, of a competing LMS software package with the commercial products Blackboard and WebCT.  Rember, my community college (http://www.cpcc.edu), the largest in the state, is making the plan to convert all of our courses from Blackboard to Moodle over the next year or two.

To all of those who would have liked to see even more of the product, I certainly wish we had more time.  I do know that your faculty webmasters at Lane (Jeffrey, Meredith, and Joe) will continue to hold Moodle workshops during the year where you can go through the software yourselves, rather than simply watching someone else do it.  Like one of your fellow colleagues said (I think her name was Sandy), give it 30 minutes of your time.  I think you will find it to be a powerful tool and easy to use.  

If your busy schedules don't have room for a workshop this term, simply request an account from your faculty webmasters and try it out yourself.  Everything you need is already online, from an integrated help system within Moodle, to all of the written documentation you could ever hope to find, online at:

http://moodle.org

Finally, if you are already use WebCT, I have some great news.  Another college made the decision to convert from WebCT to Moodle.  An educational technologist at the school programmed a script which would automatically convert a WebCT class to a Moodle one, and being an open-sourse product, he made it available on the moodle.org website.  Ask your WebCT and Moodle system administrators to give you an account and convert your existing WebCT classes over to Moodle.  It should be much more helpful for you to make a comparison, rather than trying to re-create everything from an empty Moodle shell.

If you have any suggestions for me as a presenter, I'd be glad to know your thoughts.  You can email me directly by replying to this email (do not click REPLY TO ALL).

Thanks again for your time and good luck with your LMS selection process.

D.I. von Briesen
CIT Faculty
Central Piedmont Community College