By way of edTechPost, we find this article at Dublin City University. Beyond the fact that this is a fairly large program adopting Moodle and bringing it into the big leagues, there’s this noteworthy observation embedded in DCU’s white paper:
Another problem in adopting a commercial VLE was that it might constrain us to its inherent pedagogical model. Like many commercial products, WebCT is driven by an American/Canadian pedagogical paradigm; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this model, but it is not entirely compatible with UK and Irish teaching and learning methodologies.
Open source software is usually developed as a public collaboration and the source code is freely available for users to modify. Adopting an open source VLE would enable DCU to contribute to the development of the software and hence to take a leadership position in the academic development and understanding of e-learning, opportunities which would be significantly weaker if we simply deployed a closed source, proprietary, VLE.
First, their point that interface is not instructional design-neutral is vital. These systems provide more than just URLs for locating content; they provide containers that shape both content and experience. Whether you use Blackboard, Moodle, or MovableType to host your class, you are making choices about the affordances that you can or cannot leverage as part of your pedagogy. And, of course, no system has all plusses and no minuses. This is about engineering. It’s about trade-offs and best fit between course environment and the instructional philosophies of the teachers and the institution as a whole.
Furthermore, the DCU folks clearly realize that contributing to an Open Source platform means contributing best pedagogical practices to the educational community in form of source code. Being able to see and duplicate how other teachers set up their classrooms (whether virtual or not) is valuable to teachers.
Good stuff.