Anyone using WordPress for eLearning/Moodle replacement?

Whether Moodle is better depends on what you want your website to do. Personally, I find Moodle to be a bloated and difficult to use program–just like WebCT and BlackBoard.

As such, I use WP for courses. Actually, I use WPMU so it’s easy to create new blogs each quarter, but don’t take that route unless you’re very good with PHP and normal WP.

Check out my gradebook plugin: https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/kb-gradebook/

You may also want to use something like subscribe2 or feedburner’s email subscription service so that your students can get copies of your posts by email.

I was working for a while on a plugin that would allow me to administer assignments online, but it became a very big project, so I sold the existing code to another group that plans to complete the project. But don’t hold your breath. (They’ve registered coursepress.org but haven’t put anything there yet.)

Unless you want to have students take assignments online, I’d so use WP. Otherwise, Moodle.

Here’s a couple of my course pages, if you’re curious:

https://adambrown.info/b/poli10fall07/
https://adambrown.info/b/poli104b/

adamrbrown,

Thanks for sharing your experiences with me and also giving me access to your course.

Your thoughts have confirmed my feeling that Worpress would be a slimmer way of getting these courses online. Moodle looks nice, but I feel it is again probably overkill for our department. May I ask what type of hosting package you are using for the WordPress install and how many students are accessing the courses? Just trying to get an idea if our current host can handle something like this.

I think I need to explore WordPress MU a bit more and find exactly what it can do that the standard can’t. Would it allow me to do a single install of WordPress and then just create sub blogs/sites all off of that single install? If so I that would be my preference. That way I could just create separate blogs for each individual course.

Kurt

Since I’m still finishing my PhD, I tend to only have one course each quarter. Last quarter’s website had 60 students accessing it regularly. This quarter’s site is for a course with 200 students. But even a basic hosting environment should be able to handle much, much more traffic than that.

My hosting package (godaddy) isn’t ideal for this. Check out some of the stuff under the “Hosting” link at the top of the page. Any of those are fine.

WPMU is intended for people who want to provide free blogs to a large community–e.g. wordpress.com. But it works well for my purposes. Yes, you install a single copy of WPMU, then you create as many blogs as you want. Install a copy and play with it for a while and see what you think. But again, WPMU assumes greater expertise–they don’t give much support in their forums unless you find a genuinely perplexing issue that isn’t covered in the docs.

If you do use WPMU, be sure to disable blog creation. You don’t want students creating blogs on your site–only you should be able to do that.

adamrbrown,

That’s all very encouraging. I’m trying a test install of MU right now.

Maybe this is something for the MU board, but do ALL/MOST standard WP plugins work with MU as well? That would be very important since I have a few plugins that I can’t live without…

Kurt

Almost all plugins will work fine. For the rest…

WPMU_Plugin_Compatibility

Excellent. I should have found that myself. Sorry so lazy. Thanks again for your input.

Kurt

More questions popping up…

One of the features in WebCT which actually worked really well for my students was the integrated discussion group. Anyone have any thoughts on how this could best be achieved within WP MU? I’m thinking a single install of bbpress with separate groups for each individual class. Of course this is more work and manual labor for me…

Kurt

You could use bbpress. Or just use WP’s commenting functions. If you want students to have a discussion, write a blog post introducing the topic and have them discuss it by replying to that post.

If you want a more proper looking forum, though, then I suppose you would use bbpress.

Commenting would work well, but what if a student wants to initiate a discussion? That would be an absolute must. Is there any way that they can start a comment without me first posting? I guess not…

Kurt

I haven’t tried it myself, but there’s also simple forum.

Well I use google groups and google docs to do all of that. I would suggest vanilla be a better choice than bbpress. I am a full time computer teacher frm k-12. I am also tech coordinator for a small school. I have tried installing wordpress but couldn’t get it to work the way i want. Time is my biggest problem. If anyone can provide a done package. It will be easier for me to modify contents will be of great help.
Thanks
Gaurav
[email protected]

I have had bad experiences with Moodle in terms of ease of use and the way that the themes are constructed (that said i was given limited access).

However I have integrated WordPress into a learning platform for my department here:

https://www.ribbweb.org/ict/

The things that we really use are the RSS feeds in order to allow parents to keep track of what homework their child is receiving as well and normal comments of post to get pupils opinions. The WP Polls plugin is really good as you can use those in lessons to get ideas from pupils etc.

Do take a look at our site as it is a good example of how WP can be used for education and it is getting better all the time.