Moodle vs. Blackboard

This was a great assignment being able to examine both products from a teachers perspective. In the end I would choose Moodle because it does the job (although with less bells and whistles) effectivley and more importantly its free. This project got me thinking about what other institutions are doing and I found this great research project from the University of North Carolina at Charolette on this exact topic. Here is the link.

This 38 page research paper concludes that:
"The evidence gathered by this committee strongly favors a transition to Moodle on both pedagogical and financial grounds. Moodle provides better or comparable functionality with the benefit of increased relevance and control for what in the long run will be lower cost.”

After reading this paper I found there pedagogical results to be the most facsinating.  Here are the numbers from their final report which they evaluated over 2 semesters:

Fall 2008 Details: Moodle courses taught during this semester included those that were hybrid (60%)

and on-line (40%). The faculty and students involved rated Moodle very highly on key factors of

ease of use, flexibility, facilitation of teaching/learning goals, and correspondence to one’s

teaching/learning style. Tools and functions crucial for designing and implementing Moodle courses

(Assignments, Discussions, Learning Modules, Assessments, etc.) were rated as being preferable to

those available in BbV by both faculty and students. While there were a few cases in which a basic

function (web links, etc.) were rated by students as being “about the same as Blackboard,” there were

no cases in which a Moodle function or tool of any kind was rated by either faculty or students as

being “worse than Blackboard.” (See Appendix A, page 8, and Appendix B, page 10)

Spring 2009 Details: Data from this larger group of students and faculty confirmed the findings from

the Fall semester. Data were collected from 35 faculty and 313 students. On all tools and functions

evaluated, a large majority of faculty expressed a preference (either pro-Moodle or pro-BbV), and as

in the Fall, these preferences consistently favored Moodle by wide margins. Once again, ease of use

and learning, adaptability, and sufficiency of Moodle tools were important factors for these faculty.

When asked to indicate an overall preference, 81% of faculty surveyed preferred Moodle. (See

Appendix C, page 12, and Appendix D, page 26).
Pretty interesting stuff...if I taught High school, and had enough classroom computers, I think I would start my upperclassmen on using Moodle to prepare them for college.