Alan Schueler sits at his desk opposite two twin computer monitors, moving the cursor through an invisible barrier as he tries to find a specific class section on a pilot version of Moodle, an open source application that could replace Blackboard Vista as a campus-wide course management system.

“You come in and see what you’re registered for, which in my case is a bunch of junk,” said Schueler, who is the director of Academic and Administrative Technology for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Schueler has been working with the Moodle pilot since the idea to transfer course management systems was proposed in 2007.

He clicks through a few more pages of red text and rounded edges, still looking on both monitors, before finding the one he wants.

“Let’s go to ALS 103, Spring 2009.”

A natural progression

Everything has a lifespan. 85 years, 7 billion years, 24 hours. But anything that falls in a technological category tends to live as long as it takes for something newer, shinier and faster to come along.

For campus course management systems, more formally known as Learning Management Systems, this natural progression comes about every four or five years, according to Donna Petherbridge, associate vice provost for DELTA’s Instructional Support Services.

WolfWare, the first campus-wide LMS, was written about 14 years ago.

In 1999, the University subscribed to Web CT, a commercial course management system.

“That particular product was not as enterprise as we needed it to be,” Petherbridge said.

So about five years ago, Vista took over as the official system for faculty to post quizzes, lectures, notes and references that is available to students based on their course schedule.

“It’s time for another evaluation and pilot of another system because so much has changed over the years,” Petherbridge said.

Blackboard’s decision to “start fresh” by creating a new LMS and eventually abandoning its old systems — one acquired Web CT’s Vista and the other was built in-house — coincides with the desire for for a more advanced, flexible system, DELTA’s Associate Vice Provost for Educational Technology Services Lou Harrison said.

“They’re investing all their development in this new product so, at some point in the future — certainly after 2011 — they’re going to stop working with Vista and with their old Blackboard product as well,” Harrison said. “We’ve got to move to something else. One possibility would be to move to [Blackboard’s new LMS] NG. Another possibility would be to move to something else.”

The University’s support contract with Blackboard doesn’t run out until 2011, Petherbridge said, so the transition to a new system will be slow and cautious. When they do choose a system, it will most likely run in parallel to Blackboard Vista for at least three semesters.

“We have time to look around,” Petherbridge said. “It looks like this is truly a migration to something else.”

A mostly positive reaction

The site’s interface is, in pilot mode, red and white like Vista. Other than that, Moodle has a more modern display that includes rounded edges and a collection of interactive features like a calendar, news feed for course-specific upcoming events and chat functions.

And this isn’t even Moodle in all its glory, Schueler said.

“This is not how it will look,” he said. “This is a bare bones thing where we threw it on a server and said, ‘OK, let’s see what it can do.'”

Schueler said those who have used the pilot — including DELTA and the colleges of education, natural resources and agriculture and life sciences, and anyone else who is willing to spend a little time playing with the pilot’s features — like it as well as or more than Vista.

“It’s a little bit easier, it’s a little bit faster, it’s more robust,” Schueler said. “It gives the faculty a lot of flexibility in how they set up the course, what tools they can use, what they make the page look like. … Faculty can set these courses up however they want.”

This includes creating blocks of course content either chronologically by week or by topic.

For instance, Petherbridge has set up her distance education graduate-level course page to host information like the syllabus and course outline at the top. If her students scroll down the page, they’ll see blocks separated by topics that “follow a week-to-week period.”

They’ll also find features like wikis, content, chat and forum, Schueler said, clicking around the page.

 ”It makes it very easy for them to interact with each other, particularly for distance education courses,” he said.

Moodle is in ‘serious consideration’

Petherbridge, accompanied by a team of faculty and staff that encompasses several colleges and offices, are only in the system’s experimental testing phase. They have not made a recommendation as to which service should replace Blackboard Vista, and are still looking for input.

“This is still at a very, very early stage,” said Marty Dulberg, a senior coordinator for DELTA and an adjunct assistant professor in computer science. “For this to be successful, it has to be collective. We don’t want to be in a position where we’re telling faculty what they need to do.”

Petherbridge and Dulberg, both of whom teach classes, have been testing out the system themselves.

“We’re eating our own dog food, as it were,” Harrison said.