Moodlerooms, the largest global provider of learning management systems and services for Moodle, recently announced the University of Louisiana at Monroe will convert its online learning system from Blackboard to Moodle. ULM plans to move all courses from Blackboard to Moodle by June 30, 2008.

The transition to Moodle will save ULM approximately $100,000 per year. The switch to open source software is consistent with technology trends in higher education, said Eric Pani, associate provost for Academic Affairs. “Open source software has become quite robust and Moodle offers more flexibility than commercial packages.”

Martin Knott, CEO of Moodlerooms, said, “ULM provides a great example of the way in which a leading institution can take full advantage of the online environment. We’re very excited to work with Paula (Thornhill) and the entire university for the benefit of students and faculty.”

Moodle will meet the changing needs of students and faculty, said Paula Thornhill, ULM’s Electronic Learning Facilitator.

“Moodle is a powerful content management system that empowers faculty with the ability to create an environment in which students can interact with content,” she said. “ULM students are technologically savvy and are comfortable navigating within the Moodle environment,” she said. “Students expect access to information ‘anytime, anywhere’ and ULM faculty are taking advantage of the opportunity to engage students as they extend the face-to-face classroom into an online experience.”

Sheau Yun Choo and Thornhill will offer Moodle training for faculty in online and face-to-face formats. They are also in the process of building an online Faculty Moodle Community that a ULM support team will moderate. Thornhill said, “The goal of the community is to promote the sharing of ideas and collaboration of best practices among faculty as well as providing a rich source of Moodle resources.”

Faculty representing all colleges at ULM have either participated in training or are currently delivering content via Moodle to test the new product.

About Moodlerooms

Moodlerooms, the largest provider of the free and open-source Moodle course management software services in the world, helps educators and corporate trainers create quality online courses in a way that is affordable, effective and accessible.

Moodlerooms provides wrap-around technical support, hosting, customization, instruction, training and other services needed to tap Moodle’s full potential. Moodlerooms serves more than 360 clients -- schools, universities, school districts and corporations.

Customers include the Baton Rouge city government; the University of Louisiana at Monroe; University of Guam; San Francisco State University; Montana State University, as well as Cisco and Intel Corporations. Moodlerooms has offices in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Greece, India, Jordan, Mexico, Sweden and the UK.

For more information, call Thornhill at (318) 342-1032 or e-mail her at thornhill@ulm.edu