Other VLE software

There are many pieces of software available that provide Virtual Learning Environments, both commercial and open source. The Lancaster University website contains a fairly comprehensive list of available software packages.

Speaking with people from other academic institutions, it seems that Moodle, Blackboard and WebCT seem to be the most common VLE systems in use in our area. A interesting report from a comparison between Blackboard and Moodle from Humboldt State University can be found here. At the end of the report are the results from asking students involved in the comparison which system they preferred. Interestingly, the majority of students (42.9%) expressed no preference (with 35.7% preferring Moodle, 21.4% preferring Blackboard).

Whilst investigating VLEs for use with our Technical and Production Arts degree I also came across Course Forum, described on its website as "web-based e-learning software that makes it easy for you and your students to interact, whether to create, post, share or discuss course content." Course Forum provides web pages for courses/departments/classes/whatever, and each page has its own discussion forum attached and can host pictures and files, etc. It provides navigation tools, web based admin tools and is very simple to set up and run. It runs on Windows, OS X, Linux & Unix and doesn't require any web-server software. You just run the installer on the machine you want to host it, and point your browser to that machine.

I downloaded a demo of course forum and installed it on an old desktop windows machine in the office, and we spent some time trying it out. Whilst it was very easy to setup and install, it was was a little limited in what it could provide and the method of creating and editing courses pages seemed a but unintuitive for our tutors who less familiar with web technology.