Moodle versus Drupal
more and more often i am noticing that educators are shifting to using moodle as their course management system (CMS) of choice. i think it’s great that a developer is working on moodle specifically for the education community. moodle is free and open source and provides an alternative to Blackboard/Web CT (BB recently bought it’s main competition — Web CT). my university provides BB as our CMS option. and, to let you in a little secret . . . i think i’d prefer BB to moodle as long as i am not paying for using BB. i have played with moodle on my servers. it’s a nice early attempt at a CMS, but BB is much more refined. we recently upgraded to a later BB version and there are things that are impressive. that being said, i think BB is built on an older technology and the negatives outweigh the positives. if you don’t have a choice then sure, it’s a dandy choice. however . . .
drupal recently came out with version 4.7, which makes drupal much more interactive and user friendly (e.g., AJAX supported). wow! what an improvement over each of the tools i’ve listed earlier. and, i know what you’re thinking . . . drupal isn’t built for higher education. of course not, but the underlying code is being supported by a much larger community of developers than moodle and drupal is even much bigger than BB, plus drupal is open source. further, there is an initiative to make drupal more like moodle, in that it has tools added on that make it conducive to learning.
a week or so ago, i learned about Google’s Summer of Code 2006. many of the projects that Google is helping to support are geared towards drupal (EDIT: i should also note that moodle is also a sponsoring company included in this SOC project). in fact, one of the most promising projects is an Assignment/Gradebook (snippet):
Assignment/ Gradebook suite
Drupal 4.7
The Assignment/Gradebook suite will allow instructors to create assignments. Students will be able to respond to assignments, and instructors will subsequently be able to provide both a grade and written feedback on student work. While the course instructor will be able to see all student work, students will only be able to see their own work. Additionally, teachers will have the option of showing students an in-progress grade, or just sharing comments. Teachers will also be able to export grade info in csv format (for use in spreadsheets) and all comments to txt files (for use in narrative grade reports). As a security measure, student grades will be protected behind an additional login.
this module/add-on isn’t going to make drupal a BB killer. however, i think drupal and the developers using drupal are making huge strides towards having drupal in place to make waves in education. in fact, i am now planning on adopting drupal in my classes in the very near future. Stay tuned for updates as i discover new uses for current modules and various workarounds to making the best Content MS available also the best Course MS available for the classroom.
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:30 am
Hi, regarding:
Is there a listing of Drupal stats similar to:
http://moodle.org/stats/
June 3rd, 2006 at 5:28 pm
not sure, but i just searched and couldn’t find anything.
here is a map showing about 70 developers and where they live; however, this is something that individual developers signed up for . . . so, my guess is that most developers failed to participate:
link to frappr site here
The distinction I am making is that your link shows users. Most users don’t tend to provide code to bring about improvements and add functionality. I would guess that drupal is 10 times larger than moodle with regard to the development community. The development community is crucial in providing modules and add-ons for the CMS. For example, a gradebook is an add-on for Drupal. The benefit of Moodle is that its limited number of modules and add-ons are all for the learning environment. Few of the Drupal add-ons and modules are catered to fit education. In that regard, Moodle doens’t need nearly as many developers. But, many modules that aren’t designed specifically for learning can easily be used in learning (e.g., some great blogging modules for Drupal). But, we shouldn’t just rely on my guess with regard to the number of developers, so i’ll continue to seek out the stats. The Drupal forums show tens of thousands of topics that have been started, so the community of users is pretty large.
While I have no doubt that Drupal has a larger community, I have to admit that the stats on the page you linked are impressive. I’ll join the Drupal community and ask if anyone knows the numbers and has a link.
June 3rd, 2006 at 9:51 pm
okie dokie, i found this link for drupal stats.
of note, they released drupal 4.7 1 month ago and it’s been downloaded 50,000 times already.
the fact that drupal is at 4.7 and moodle is at version 1.5 should help to illustrate the development cycle and maturity level of the two products; though, this isn’t an exact science by any means.
here is a comment that gets at the developer side of things:
“There have been over 338 contributors to this latest release with over 1500 patches which is almost triple our previous record with Drupal 4.6 of 523 commits by 50 developers.
So again, in the space of about a year, we see exponential growth, this time in the number of contributors to the project (which one could argue is the most important number of all ;)).
There are about 800 contrib modules, although they are of varying levels of quality/completeness and may or may not be tagged for the current releases of Drupal. The 4.7 contrib contains about 400, and the 4.6 contrib about 300.”
June 4th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Regarding version numbers, is MSIE 6 more mature than Firefox 1.5?:p
Last I checked there were 170 developers (with CVS access) contributing to the core Moodle code, and hundreds more contributing optional modules and code snippets on the Moodle.org forums.
On the other hand, if you want position Drupal as an LMS, you might need look at the developers who are actively working on LMS features, which generally are quite difficulet to design well as they must be easy for faculty to use on the back-end as well as students on the front-end. If you don’t have a range of faculty at different technological skill levels to draw on for interface and feature design, it is difficult to build tools that will really work well in an educational setting.
A path that might prove more fruitful is to provide features that Moodle doesn’t already do effectively, such as Student information and Portal features, with Drupal, and link to Moodle as the LMS.
We actually are about to release a demo site that does this, with Drupal as the front end portal for a virtual campus, and Moodle as the LMS. In this case, Drupal provides the portal features such as keeping track of interested students, program information, application and FAFSA forms, etc., with Moodle providing the course and degree program management features on the LMS end.
Many institutions are struggling to provide electronic student information systems (SIS), with the available commercial systems (Peoplesoft, Banner, etc.) being extremely expensive and not much available from the OS community (where there are already several decent OS projects and dozens of commercial ones).
IMO, the student information management space is one where a solid open source product (especially one easy to integrate with a mature open source LMS like Moodle;-) could really take off.
June 4th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Hey, Sean. Long time, no talk. I’m actually going to try and run an online summer school English class for our high school students this month. A friend introduced me to ATutor. I’ve only had a little time to play with it, but it’s definitely more “visually appealing” when compared to Moodle.
For now, I’m going to make my Simple Machines forum (http://www.tcvikings.com) and our school’s Edline site (something else I’ve been busy with) the base for my first online class. We’ll see how it goes!
June 4th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Michael, I fear I’ve made a mistake in my original post . . . I am choosing Drupal, but that doesn’t mean that I’d recommend it for other educational users. In fact, I’d recommend Moodle to any school or teacher on a budget just like I recommend Blackboard to the average instructor at my institution. There’s something to be said for being easy to use and having the pieces just work. With Drupal, many of the pieces are not specific to education and that will take some work. There was a link in my original post that lead to a site that is finding ways to make Drupal work in education, but that’s Moodle’s core objective. Moodle is an awesome free alternative when schools/teachers want to venture online. Kudos to Moodle.
My point is just that I didn’t particularly like the time I played around with Moodle. I tried a few years ago and again recently. I really like the Assignment Manager in the newer Blackboard versions and that’s something that is being developed for Drupal this summer. Perhaps it exists in Moodle, but I tried Moodle’s forum and that was what I liked the least. Honestly, I should spend some time looking it over better before I write it off, eh?
—–
Rob, great to hear from you. I was at the Arts festival yesterday, but i didn’t see you. I figured you probably wouldn’t be hanging out there early on a Saturday morning. Most of the decent music was happening later in the evenings.
I hadn’t heard of ATutor, but I am going to check it out. I really need a gradebook to be able to leave Blackboard completely. Obviously Moodle has it and Drupal is getting it. ATutor appears to have it already as well, so that’s a plus. Thanks for the tip. Good luck with your first online class. I have no doubt you’ll be fine as you’ve got the geeky gene that can make these things work (at least you don’t look the part). Heh heh.