Towards a DECclic III à la Moodle!

Next year, the DECclic College Platform Corporation is changing direction.

In order to expand the community of practice that has developed in recent years, the corporation has decided to turn to Moodle, a free digital learning environment which already benefits from a large community of deve
lopment.

Moodle logo

This decision follows the recommendations of a committee appointed by the board to find the best way to ensure the sustainability of our network tool. Moodle is gaining in popularity and has already been implemented in several colleges and universities. In the current context, with the proliferation of technological tools available to teachers, a digital learning environment must remain at the cutting edge and future developments of Moodle are very promising. After all, there are over 230 Moodle developers around the world and over 600 modules (plug-ins) that can be added to the base application.

DECclic will continue its mission to offer its members a common tool, hosted and maintained on central servers, and all the user training and support that have been its strength for over ten years.

The DECclic team will continue to support teachers and educational advisors while providing a smooth transition towards an environment which offers more possibilities.

As of autumn 2010, a first experimental group will explore the Moodle environment while the current DECclic II continues to serve its users.

Interface Overview

Meanwhile, an integration team will ensure the selection of Moodle components that best suit college needs and will develop migration tools which will allow the reuse of:

• Exam Studio questionnaires,
• DECclic schedules,
• DECclic directories and Web content.

In the fall of 2011, we will provide service to all our Moodle users while continuing to support the current DECclic II. In this way, each will be able to learn our new environment at his or her own pace.

The Moodle.org site lists more than 50,000 Moodle installations in over 200 countries. The estimated number of users is 30 million, which makes it the most widespread and widely-used digital learning environment. The Open University in the United Kingdom is the biggest player with over 600,000 users and 5,000 courses.

In addition to the basic features found in any good digital learning environment, (e-mail, forums, file sharing, Web page creation and online evaluations), Moodle offers a range of tools, such as blogs, wikis, video integration, audio recording and live video, instant messaging, etc. A mobile version for iPod / iPad / iPhone will be available soon, and many users of Office Suite can publish their Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or their PowerPoint presentations using a plug-in developed by Microsoft. The possibilities are endless.

So are you ready to change direction with us? We look forward to reading and responding to your comments!