Course Management Systems are quickly becoming a standard part of a schools curriculum in higher education. Blackboard is the industry standard for large schools. Other options include Moodle and Sakai. Moodle is very popular due to its open-source nature. It is inexpensive and adaptable to many different applications.
I have had the opportunity to investigate Moodle from both a student’ and teacher’s point of view. As a student, most of the tools were easy to use. The wiki and the chat function were at times frustrating because they were not consistently stable. The other tools within Moodle like quizes and forums seemed to work fine. From a teacher perspective, the grading within Moodle seems at this point to have a high learning curve. It does offer great customization of weighting and aggregation, but these features are a bit daunting if you have never used them before.
