Moodle in distance ed

Eric Clarke, with a lovely Irish accent, from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin delivered a session on the use of Moodle (and how much it costs to run). Yes, for all those out there still going after Open Source because it is free: Sorry to disappoint you, but there are enough other costs in keeping a VLE up and running. He gives a lovely description: 'What are we really going on about: is it all about lawsuits and : 'My VLE is bigger than yours' or is about teaching and learning?

The use of Moodle is a great success, but he gave us the warning: do take third party support, network and servers into account (180K euros and that's without the costs of user support.) The problems they are now facing are ironically their heavy reliance on Moodle, and the large amount of materials and tools on offer which confuse students without structure.

Research into a new VLE for the OU

Steven Verjans from the Open University in The Netherlands has been researching their demands for a VLE. Strangely enough this is taking place as they just have starting deploying Blackboard. They find that Blackboard is, however, strongely based on the classroom metafor and not suitable for their teaching. Students don't meet in a classroom in the OU setting and learn independently and self paced.
Quite understandably the OU is not thinking on a short term adoption, but rather thinking three years ahead.
They appear to have a preference for an open source framework approach allowing for webservices. I do get the slight impression at this point the preference is based on technological innovative solution, rather than students' basic demands.