[LON-CAPA-users] LON-CAPA and Moodle

[Lars Jensen]

Hi Ed,

Well, I'm not quite sure what you want to hear about, but in comparing 
moodle and lon-capa, I'd say that some advantages of moodle are:

1) More intuitive to use - both for students and instructor.
It is easy to add modules and resources in moodle, and they are easy to 
find and access for students. This is because everything in moodle is 
centered around *one* web page.

2) The forum module (and chat module) in moodle is very simple to use 
for students. Students get email notification of every post in the 
class, and can reply to this directly from their email program. Posts 
are nicely threaded. And there is a search function that quickly find 
posts containing the search words.

3) New class activity is clearly posted and visible to every class member.

The strengths of lon-capa I value the most are:

1) Superb homework engine, which includes the ability of class members 
to post questions/comments to each problem right under the problem.

2) Lots of parameters to tweak provides great flexibility when setting 
up assignments (I'm referring to the PARM page here).

Moodle has a gradebook that probably functions a little better than that 
of lon-capa: "Simple grading" in lon-capa works OK, but it is just that. 
The spreadsheet is so complicated that it is prohibitive.

Hope this helps. If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy ta 
answer them also.

Lars.

Edwin Kashy wrote:
> Hi Lars,
> Would you expand a bit on your statement  " ...because it facilitates 
> class discussion. It does so better than any other system I know. ..." 
> In what way(s) does it do this better compared to other systems?
> Thanks,
> Ed
> 
> Lars Jensen wrote:
> 
>> Hi Gerd,
>>
>> We have been using moodle for 2-3 years and its been working well for 
>> us. In fact, our campus has just decided to adopt moodle as one of our 
>> supported platforms. I'm teaching an algebra based physics course 
>> using the msu phys231 sequence as my homework/lecture materials in 
>> lon-capa, and I'm using moodle for the labs in the same course. I have 
>> a link in lon-capa to moodle and vice versa. Moodle works well with 
>> other platforms because it facilitates class discussion. It does so 
>> better than any other system I know. Moodle is less sophisticated when 
>> it comes to the homework engine, so we use lon-capa or webwork (in 
>> math) for this purpose. This poses no problems.
>>
>> Lars.
>>
>>
>> Gerd Kortemeyer wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> As a reaction to a posting in the Sloan-C mailing list, the question  
>>> arose if there's a university that's running both Moodle and LON- 
>>> CAPA. If so, we would very much appreciate any comments regarding 
>>> how  these two systems might complement each other, and how they 
>>> compare  to each other in everyday use.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> - Gerd.
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> LON-CAPA-users@mail.lon-capa.org
>>> http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/listinfo/lon-capa-users
>>
>>
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> 
>