Did we ask our students whether they liked moodle before saying no to facebook?

As ODL practitioners, many of us are fascinated by moodle (http://moodle.com) and the “neat” things it can do for our students. However, did we for once stop and ask our students whether they actually liked moodle?

Well I DID when I surveyed approximately 500 adult ODL students at Wawasan Open University (WOU) asking them how they felt about the moodle based learning management system (LMS) WOU uses. To my surprise (being a bit sarcastic here) many of them pointed out some serious flaws with the system when it comes to providing them the support they need. Okey…. Then I asked them what features they wanted in an LMS which resulted in them suggesting a whole list of possible enhancements to moodle. However, when I started analysing the suggestions, I found out that they can be broadly categorised into four categories: (i)  a better user interface; (ii) more quality discussions; (iii) faster response time; and (iv) a proactive approach to discussions which would e-mail/SMS you as soon as a new post takes place. Being the devoted facebook user I used to be, it was blindingly obvious to me that they were comparing facebook to the moodle. This dictated the next two years of research where I used my students as guinea pigs to identify how exactly facebook could be used in place of an official LMS. You can read more of my endeavours at  library.wou.edu.my/vertical/vf2011-17.pdf .

Sure enough, once the students got used to using facebook instead of the moodle LMS, they wanted to stop visiting moodle altogether. This then put me in a bit of a pickle as I had to duplicate all my posts on the official LMS inside all of my facebook course groups. Although I did this mechanically early on just to see the glee in the students’ feedback, I soon got tired of it and wondered day and night how I can make my life easier. Sure enough, being true to the cult of techis, I started writing a facebook application which could infiltrate moodle and bring all of its postings onto facebook. This would potentially solve the problem for both the parties as the students will get all the info posted on moodle in their facebook account. As such I will only need to post stuff once.

All was well until I found out that I will not be allowed access to the moodle backend of WOU (“as security is of the utmost importance and moodle is viewed as a safer place than facebook from hackers” ;D ) to extract the necessary information directly from the database. Not giving up, I wrote Faboodle, which is essentially facebook for moodle, incorporating an intelligent algorithm which mimicked the student on moodle by working on the HTTP request (more details can be found at library.wou.edu.my/vertical/vf2011-25.pdf).

Since then, I have been using facebook to support all my ODL courses. With the push information architecture of facebook as opposed to the pull information architecture of moodle, the students get instant alerts about new postings which in turn promote more discussions. We (myself, tutors and students) conduct group revision using the group chat features and constantly keep track of each others research activities.

I was once asked by an experienced distance educator whether I saw facebook as a replacement for moodle and conventional LMS. My answer at the time was that facebook will never replace an official institutional LMS simply because the institution has no control over facebook. However, if it were up to me, I would prefer to give the students what they want rather than giving them what we want.