UC Home > Departments > UCTL
| University Centre for Teaching and Learning |  |
I wish to advise that the University is to adopt the Moodle open-source platform as its learning management system. It will replace the current Blackboard and StudentNet systems.
This 15-month project involved members from across the university community, including over 70 staff and a large number of students who were involved in trials and rated the Moodle system highly.
The system is used by a number of the world’s leading universities; there is also a developing community of users in New Zealand.
A timeline for implementation has been developed to facilitate phased introduction of Moodle during 2009. It is intended that the system will be fully operational at the start of 2010. UCTL will provide support for staff throughout the change process.
Details of the implementation plan and timeline for introduction of Moodle, along with the project's full report, can be found at
http://www.uctl.canterbury.ac.nz/moodle.
Dr Jan Cameron
Assistant Vice-Chancellor (Academic)
Moodle is an open source online learning system with a large and active support and user community around the world. It can provide communication and file sharing help to support courses, whether face-to-face, blended mode or distance. A Moodle site can support groups of students such as year groups or specific interest groups etc. Moodle can help a class or a group to manage their own learning and to support each other. It can help to improve communication and interest.
Moodle is becoming the Learning Management System of choice in New Zealand with four of the universities (most recently, Massey) and most of the Polytechnics having now adopted it. Internationally, universities which have adopted it include University of California at Los Angeles, Athabasca Open University of Canada, the Open University of the U.K., Glasgow University, and the University of Southern Queensland.
Moodle was created by Martin Dougiamas, a WebCT administrator at Curtin University, Australia, who has graduate degrees in Computer Science and Education. Moodle can also be called a 'Virtual Learning Environment' (VLE) or 'Learning Platform'. It provides a range of teaching and learning tools and resources (e.g. glossary, quiz, online assignment, groups, sections for adding resources) including student-focused collaborative learning tools and activities (e.g. discussion forum, wiki, journal). These can be harnessed to provide anytime anywhere student access to learning opportunities by extending the current teaching and learning that takes place in lectures and tutorials/workshops into an online environment.
Moodle was chosen as the LMS for the university on the basis of the positive feedback from lecturers and students in the 2008 trial. Change was inevitable - whether it meant adopting a new version of the existing Blackboard in 2010 or going to a new LMS such as Moodle. Read the documentation available regarding the impetus for change, the change process itself and the 2008 LMS trial for staff and students.