Posted by jun.asis in Open Mike, Software, The Internet | 9 Comments
Moodle: Open Source e-Learning in the Philippines
From software to hardware, Linux to WordPress, prosthetics to automobiles, open source is everywhere. Locally we hope to catch up with the pending FOSS bill too.
And get this. There is also open source beer!
Among the open source greats is a learning management system (LMS) called Moodle. With the cheap PC and connectivity projects, we may have found an answer to problem that is education.
From Moodle.org
Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University.
Moodle has been adopted by many educational institutions worldwide and is steadily gaining prominence in the Philippines. Among its features are lessons, quizzes, forums and reports just to name a few. And since it is open source, everything is customizable. There is a friendly forum for support at the site. Goiong further, it may even spur some IT businesses such as consultancy and tech support which can also offer services to international Moodle users.
Currently, De La Salle schools, St. Paul, Xavier, SEAMCO, UPOU, People Support and several other institutions are using Moodle as their platform of choice for eLearning.
The recent 5th National eLearning Conference held last November 28-29, organized by the Philippine eLearning Society, drew participants from down south to the far north, mostly educators. Most of them have seen the potential of the LMS and are eager to use it for their own schools. If this is any indication of the increasing interest over Moodle, it would only be a matter of time before we’ll see its widespread use in the country.
If we can just get our heads together and develop content for the curriculum of our basic education and place it in Moodle, we have the possibility of having a school on a USB drive. Imagine education at a fraction of the current cost! Moodle, together with the low-cost PC projects, maybe we will.
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- Filipino-made Free and Open Source
- Open Source bill
Ateneo uses it too. Check out https://moodle.ateneo.edu:8080/.
The moodle.org link to this post returns an error message.
It was our project in Management Information Systems subject at FEU – East Asia College. We are to present the LMS to some faculty members, like a tutorial on how to install, create courses, manage quizzes, etc. By the way, tomorrow will be our final presentation! Yey!
Just to give us a better perspective, perhaps you may wish to take a look at this: http://www.google.com.ph/search?hl=en&q=moodle+vs.+social+software&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
On a similar vein, a free downloadable book (the hard copy might sell for about US$15)would be out sometime in January 2007. Title is “Coming of Age: Introduction to the new World Wide Web, 2nd ed.” Work in progress can be viewed here: http://web2booklet.blogspot.com/
Duh! a lot of educational institutions are already using moodle and there are a lot of the open source “LMS”, the problem with institutions be it private or public is that it seldom gets intelligent and technically skilled people.
The management theorize a lot, and never things into action. We like to reinvent stuff, we like to turn the wheel, and never bothered to check if a solution already exists.
Folks, you know how to use a search engine right? if you do, please do use a decent one, else you get a whole lot of crap. Now, if really do know how to use a search engine, go search for a solution on online software that you need, be sure to append “open source” or a specific license you need to your keyword. If you do this right, I guarantee you, you will find a free/open sourced software to your liking.
Just thought I’d share this too. For what it is worth. Read more here. I am inclined to agree that it might be a matter of going beyond LMS (which appears rather top-down) 2 cents?
I tried NineHub.com provides free Moodle hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Good enough!
We are the Corporate Management DUH and we live in the Philippines. We have offices in Makati and Ortigas. DUH.
And we like to theorize, analyze and we just finished setting up our LMS after 5 years. DUH
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?????????//