Talk:Course Management Systems

From School Computing

So....course management systems.

Here's how I became interested. Other than some of my post graduate classes being hosted on WebCT I hadn't really ever been involved with course management systems but I had wanted to establish our school as a model in the middle east for (b)leading edge technology. I working with Microsoft-Jeddah I was well-down the road to accomplishing this task when I changed to another school in Saudi Arabia.

Fast forward to arriving at a school in The Netherlands and where I found another chance to look ahead. Microsoft Education (Netherlands) was getting ready to release their ClassServer software in Dutch and was very open to helping our school deploy the English version in our school and perhaps bring some prospective clients from Dutch schools to see what we were doing with this solution. I was able to gain sponsorship (a donated server and support) from a local solution provider and HP/Compaq.

When it was determined that the Dutch version of ClassServer was not going to be released after all we found that our Microsoft rep was not so eager to continue their support of our pilot project. Having spent several months selling the concept to a few techers unable to evade my e-vangelism I now felt a responsibility to provide them with some kind of solution. A visiting candidate for our headship search mentioned his success with moodle in Peru and asked what I thought about it. As I had no idea I decided I'd better learn something about moodle just in case this guy landed the job at our school.

I found the folks at moodle.org to be quite helpful and patient with a non-native speaker of .php (okay, a NON-speaker of .php) and with only one or two e-mail exchanges I was able to get the opensource components (MySQL, PHP, Apache, and moodle) on their feet and serving up pages. Our teachers began to experiment and, before long, demonstrated much more buy-in than I had expected. HP wrote a case study and the solution partner gained a contract to provide our school with 75+ computers. Not a bad deal for any of us.

Now I am in an independent school in Virginia that has a 1:1 laptop program. Lots of computers but little in the way of tying them to learning. innovations are happenning but more of the teacher-specific rather than vision-oriented type. This is still good but I want to take it further.

I am in the final phases of securing sponsorhip (a new server and trimmings) form another corporate sponsor. With any luck I'll be able to sare our URL with readers of this WIKI and get some feedback.