I’ve been using moodle for more than a year now in my courses. It’s an excellent package for putting together online and/or hybrid courses. I am comfortable using it and thought I would explore other options out there for the next semester starting in April. Coincidentally, today I was talking with one of the teachers in the Information Science section of the Administration faculty about getting a course management system (CMS) running for our university. It turns out the costs are too high to put one in place at the moment (that’s why I started my own domain–to run a CMS). He heard me talk about moodle and suggested I try zoops. I had seen a presentation at the JALTCALL conference in Mito, Japan in June, 2004 and did not see anything that could make it compete with moodle.
Anyway, I downloaded the package and uploaded it to the domain here. I needed to upload just one part of the package, which was a bit unintuitive, but the rest of the installation went very smoothly. For this, it earns very high marks. xoops can install modules very easily and comes with about ten ready to go. All you have to do is choose the ones you want and install them one at a time. You can also go to the xoops modules repository and choose others to install. At this writing there were 297!
The sole reason I tried xoops was because I was told there is a quiz module available. I installed that one and was facing a serious user interface problem. Unlike moodle, which gives you many kinds of quiz question types, I had to work my way through an interface that had only ‘create a category’ and ‘delete a category.’ I created one and went to the next screen filled with more of the same. I never did find a place to write a quiz question. In contrast, moodle asks what kind of question and even has several formats with which to write quiz questions and upload them. Until xoops has this kind of module, it will never have the utility of moodle.
Clearly, xoops is a CMS, but it is a content management system. It cannot be used to do the same kinds of things moodle does without a major amount of customization. To make a course, for example, I see having to create groups and using permissions for each student. I did that with phpbb (a great dedicated discussion board package, by the way) for a couple of semesters, but I had mostly the same students all the way through. Most of the work setting it up was just in the beginning.
If you want courses which are easy to set up, go with moodle.