On Line Learning Environments

The main academic offerings are Blackboard and WebCT - the latter is said to be merging with Blackboard. Leaving Blackboard, part owned by Microsoft seemingly in a monopoly situation! Sounds familiar?

However, it is early days and there is an open-source offering called moodle. It has been tested against blackboard by splitting an on-line learning course into 2 groups. Moodle came out just ahead.

Moodle is slightly more informal looking, and it has lots of other features as standard such as

wikis
quizes

and you can create your own multiple choice tests and on line learning resources quite easily.

I guess you can do some of this in blackboard but if so it is not implemented in the sites I use.

So, to sum up -0 not that much to choose between the 2 systems except that

moodle is free

Blackboard is part owned by the Beast Microsoft.

Seems like a no-brainer to me!

Could a museum make use of these sites? The answer is yes but there is a learning curve and a school is not going to invest in that curve just for one Museum visit - if a school is already using Moodle, then it would be worth setting up something with them otherwise only if a very close relationship between the school and the Museum.

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