Moodle at Albany Senior High School

Why Use Moodle?
Moodle is at the centre of engaging teaching and learning programmes at New Zealand's newest (and open source) Senior High school.

Why we chose Moodle:
When looking at the kinds of online learning environments Albany Senior High School needed in order to deliver a curriculum for the 21st century, we knew that we wanted a wide range of powerful tools without being crippled by excessive software licensing costs. Our wish-list for our Learning Management System included:

• alignment with our school vision and values of openness, transparency and equality
• web-based (and therefore accessible from school, home, the library etc.)
• engaging, interactive, multimedia activities
• easy-to-use, intuitive user interface
• support from a large user community
• focus on quality, co-constructive teaching and learning
• a 'distributed workload' so staff were in control of their areas and one person didn't have to update the whole intranet

We found that of all of the LMSs available, (open source and commercial) Moodle delivered best on our wishlist. One of the key reasons we decided to go for Moodle was the size of the support community. There are great help guides and tutorials for most applications because there are literally tens of millions of users out there.

Many of these users actively create help and teaching resources for others in the community, and the forums are a great place to find out more information or solve problems.
Another reason we chose an open source solution in particular is because of the economies of scale: the more people who use open source, the cheaper it gets for everyone. If the Open University puts £5m into the development of Moodle (as it did recently) that development is made available (free of charge) to the whole community.