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E-portfolio assignment #2: A Learning Management System (LMS) proposal To the school Administrators, Introduction To address the request

of many teachers who are considering transferring a portion of their course online to better communicate with students and parents, the technology committee has evaluated a number of web publishing tools and learning management systems (LMS). In the following document, we would like to propose the implementation of a learning management system (LMS) through our school server. Specifically we have chosen Moodle. This proposal will outline our evaluation process, why we believe Moodle is the best choice and the implementation procedure for this learning management system. Rationale Learning management system (LMS) are softwares that helps to manage course delivery online by keep track of students, course information and facilitate activities. Moodle is one type of LMS, which was created with educational principles to make the technical aspect of delivering a course online easier (Cole & Foster, 2008). Many teachers at our school currently manage their own website for a way to communicate with students outside of the classroom. Most commonly it is through Google Sites, Nicenet and blog hosts such as WordPress, and Blogger. Success has been reported but many issues have arisen as well, such as finding a way for students to take online quizzes, giving teachers an easy way to manage students activity online and incorporating discussion forums. We also hope to create an easy template and have the support available so that more teachers who had been limited by time restraint and technical ability can easily start their own course site. This also creates the possibility in the future for all courses to run through the same LMS and students and parents can find all their courses in one location. Evaluation criteria To evaluate Moodle against its competitors, we will employee Bates and Pooles (2003) framework. First we will explore interactivity available in the LMS. Does it include features we require such as uploading course content, discussion forum, video, assessment tools, space for group collaboration, quizzes and password protected individual student space. Moodle meets these needs. Moodle is webbased and is accessible on any computer at school or at home. Next we examine the ease of navigation and organization of the site. Students and parents do not need to invest a lot of time in learning to use the site. The home page organization of each course is simple and has a list of important information and events. The administrative task of setting up the server is the difficult step. At least one school that we know of in the district is using Moodle for all teacher websites. Therefore the district is likely able to support our school in starting up Moodle. Setting up courses is fairly intuitive. Teachers can set up their course on any computer at school and from home. Moodle has a large community of users all over

the world and many troubleshooting questions can be answered online. Training sessions or professional development days can be set aside to support teachers with set up. Moodle was released in 2002 and has become a popular option for managing online courses. Moodle is a popular choice for many because the software is free and is open source. Open source means that the documentation and code behind the program is free and available to everyone. Anyone can suggest and make modification to the program. The advantage to this is that even if the developer decides to terminate his contribution, there will always be a network of interested contributors. This also means that we do not need to worry that we will be charged for using this software in the future. Open source means that it will stay free. This sets Moodle apart from many of its competitors. Implementation To set up Moodle, we need to first see if our school district has already set up a server than runs Moodle. If we do not, then we need the school technician to help us set one up. This process for someone who has experience on how to run servers should take 1-2 hours. The site administrator can then set up an account for interested teachers and register their courses for them. This may take 2-3 weeks depending on the number of staff interested. More teachers and courses can be easily added in the future. Each teacher can then navigate and set up their course page, which may take anywhere upwards of 1 hour. The teacher may use as few or as many features on Moodle as they wish. Therefore it does not require long initial setup time. A committee of teachers with experience in Moodle can be set up to support teachers and the online community of Moodle users is always a great resource. We can tentatively plan to launch Moodle by next school year. Conclusion Moodle is a free learning management system that can address many of the concerns our teachers currently have regarding classroom websites. From the school Technology Committee References: Bates, A.W. & Poole, G. (2003). Chapter 4: a Framework for Selecting and Using Technology. In Effective Teaching with Technology in Higher Education: Foundations for Success. (pp. 77-105). San Francisco: Jossey Bass Publishers. Cole, J. & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle, 2nd edition. (2nd ed.). Retrieved from http://docs.moodle.org/23/en/Using_Moodle_book

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