I am here to share my experiences with Moodle implementation at INMANTEC.

History
This story goes back two years. When one of our faculty member went to Vancouver Island University with the students for the PDD program.When they came back my fellow colleague gave me the name of this software and told me that entire university runs on this software.I thought why not to experiment with it. I downloaded it and tried to install it. Initially i could not understand an inch of it, but slowly and gradually i got accustomed to it. I initially tried it to install in my own system on XAMPP. It was easy to install and work. I got accustomed to it very easily and at last you would  wonder that it took one long year to learn it.

Now, you all will be wondering that earlier I told that it is an easy software to work with and now I am telling that it took one year to learn the software.

Ha ha ha... :)

It was just due to many other engagements of mine. The time I started learning moodle I was course coordinator - MCA at INMANTEC. Six months i took to install, reinstall on different Operating Systems like Windows and Linux and check issues those might come. Then next 6 months to understand the features of the software.

I have done many experiments with moodle and at last I found that it was good software for an educational institution. I was astonished to know that it is a great software which provides ample opportunity to learn and experiment. This software made mine and my colleagues life easier.

Some of the Problems

Problem 1:
When we teach students we use to give notes, presentations, online materials to students in their pen drives and this was the reason why our laptops and PCs were formatted every month or worse than that every week.

Problem  2:
I personally faced issues like when we want to pass an information to students we either use to tell them in their classes or paste notice on the notice boards. Students have tendency that they give it a damm on whatever is their on the notice board. When we ask them have you read the notice they use to say we haven't read it and some students even told us that notice was not their on the notice board.

We tried displaying notices on our website, but volume of the notices were so large that website was not able to handle this.

We always have to ask the website admin to upload the notices, again an Issue!!

Problem 3:
We use to give syllabus, lesson plans, rule books and other official documents in booklet form or printouts to students.

Problem 4:
Use to display old notices again and again. Moreover on a new A4 Sheet on Notice board [Sheer wastage of paper!!]

I had so many other issues but not to mention on a public portal.

Some of the problems are petty but when it comes daily in your own life it becomes a headache. They were for me atleast. All these problems were solved by features of moodle.

I will now tell what i had done to make moodle work for us.

Ah! At last I found someone to solve my problems!!

Moodle!!!

Great software Indeed. If you are an academician and would like to solve your problems this software that will solve most of your issues. It works well with most of the Databases and operating systems. I have personally tried on Ubuntu 10.04, Windows 2003 and Win XP believe me it is trivial.

There are many books, videos and documentation on the web.

Let me show you my work on moodle and how i had customized it for my college.

We call moodle as cms (Course Management System). The weblink to moodle of INMANTEC is http://cms.inmantec.edu/.

This is a glimpse of my work. I will explain you the features which I had used to solve my problems and the features of moodle which can be used to facilitate users of an academic institution.

Implementation done so far:

1. I am using forums to be used as Notice Boards for our major departments. Departments those we had covered include Master of Computer Application, Post Graduate Diploma of Management, Corporate Resource Division (Placements Department), Bachelor of  Business Administration, Bachelor of Computer Application, Examination and others.
2. All the resources like Time Table, Rules, Academic Calender, ALMANAC(Used to describe the activities for the session) and some other documents are displayed in the middle section of the front page.
3. We also did customization of the moodle theme so as to be in sync with our INMANTEC website.
4. For all our upcoming events and activities we use calender module and upcoming events block.
5. For stopping people other than INMANTEC students from enrolling themselves to our cms with their own Email IDs we are using Google Apps for it.

I hope you have enjoyed the blog and have understood the basic issues that we had as an academic institution.

Will be happy if you could provide some valuable feedback. Thanks for reading.