For those of you haven't heard of Moodle, here is a description from their website. "Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)." Basically you install it on a web server and can use it to manage and deliver courses online. That is really an oversimplification, it can be used for many different purposes. The session I attended the Library Technology Conference was hands on and doesn't really translate that well into a blog post, so I am going to concentrate on ways that I think it could be used by SELCO and its member libraries.
Moodle is a very mature open source project which is being used in many educational settings including at the University of Minnesota. It has a low cost to implement and a relatively low learning curve. Moodle could replace at least two third-party tools that we currently pay for. It seems like a direct replacement for Coursewhere, and Moodle can do surveys so we wouldn't need Zoomerang any longer. Here are some of the other ways I think it could be used.
SELCO has been creating a lot of flash based video tutorials for simple topics such as, how to reset a pin, how to use the catalog, and how to use MNLink. They have tutorials on cataloging and Horizon. They have also been producing video content on their SELCOtv site. Moodle could be a one stop shop to aggregate all this content. This content could also be included in various courses on Moodle and augmented into full-fledged online courses, complete with required reading, assignments, activities, and quizzes to measure the expected outcomes/competencies/goals. It could take the place of some of the on-site classes, and would be available to the librarians 24/7. It could also be used to supplement the face-to-face training happening on-site.
Moodle could also be used by libraries to deliver training to their patrons. It could be used to train patrons on the new Aquabrowser front-end to the catalog. It could be used to train librarians on new services available in their library. There was a separate session at the conference on using Moodle as an online forum for book clubs. Moodle has discussion forums, wikis, databases, and the list goes on.
Moodle runs on a standard LAMP(Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack which is a platform that could be easily leveraged for other websites/services. For instance, there are a lot of libraries that are moving to drupal as a content management system for their websites, drupal runs on LAMP. The LAMP stack could be leveraged by any library that wants to do a more advanced website than simple html, or blogger posting to their site.
I've just outlined a few of the uses of Moodle. I'm sure once we started using it in earnest we'd find lots of other uses for it.
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