Complaints about Moodle

The Caltech ARC (Academics and Research Committee) Chair sent me this recent email thread with complaints from Caltech students about Moodle (all names deleted). Please note that these are just the complaints; she didn't solicit any praise...

Alan

.....

On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 6:42 AM

> Moodle seems to be becoming popular among the administrators...


Here at LSE they use Moodle.

I can't recommend strongly enough that the students of Caltech fight as hard
as possible to keep that piece of shit away.

If you thought the original Caltech REGIS was buggy, gratuitous and
annoying, moodle is so much worse.

Really, it is in every way inferior to a simple course website with links to
PDFs. If they really want some centralized way to password-protect homework
assignments, tell them to use mediawiki or some other reasonably sane piece
of software.

[snip]

________________________

As someone who has TA'd a class using Moodle, I second that it is a
horrid trainwreck of a program. A regular wiki with some access
controls on pages (and some that are student-editable, too!) should
suffice. We don't need our grades delivered to us through a
half-usable brushed-metal Web 1.1 interface.

[snip]
________________________


I'm the ARC (Academics and Research Committee) Chair, the top student government officer and main student representative to faculty on academics and research. I meet with the Vice Provost and academic faculty board chairs on a regular basis.

Anyhow, Craig tells me that you guys hate Moodle. This is my first term using Moodle, so I don't really know what really sucks about it yet. Could you guys could enumerate why it sucks, what it's missing, how it can be improved, what's a better system to use and why, etc.? The faculty, especially those on the Academic Policies Committee, seem to think it's really good idea and are trying to gradually push and expand Moodle to a bunch of classes right now, but if it's as god-awful as you say it is, then I will do my best to fight it.

We have a meeting this Friday, so if you could send me the comments/complaints before then, that would be awesome. Feel free to let others in on this as well.


[snip]
ARC Chair

________________________



> Could you guys could enumerate why it sucks, what it's missing...

I can't think of any benefit it has to anyone. The vast majority of users here solely use it to download course materials such as problem sets. For this purpose, it is wholly inferior to a simple course website with the assignments on it. Moodle is cluttered with a billion "features," that, to the best of my knowledge, essentially never get used and simply make it more annoying to deal with. It has forums and newsfeeds, etc., making it more like facebook and harder to use the few features that I need since it has displaced course websites.

It has technical problems. It uses client-side scripting for many things and is gratuitously complicated. For example, when a course document such as an assignment or set of slides is posted, it does not provide a link to get the file, but instead tries to embed it in a webpage for some unknown reason. Neither the school computers nor most students' home computers could display this, so for a week until the Moodle team found a fix to the problem, it was essentially impossible to see or download any course documents online.

It also crashes. Not so infrequently, and when the rest of the LSE web site is still up. When I can't get lecture notes before class due to a bloated piece of web software that is completely unnecessary, it is really frustrating.

> Could you guys could enumerate ..., how it can be improved, what's a better system to use and why, etc.?

I think the appropriate question is not "how can moodle be improved?" but "why do you want to put something buggy between students and the course materials they need in the first place?"

If your goal is to provide some central, easy-to-edit location for course web pages, why not use a more transparent solution such as MediaWiki (which, like Moodle, is free/OSS). It's incredibly easy to navigate as a user (student), incredibly easy for the editors (profs/TAs), easy to set up different levels of password protection if you want some student editable pages or whatever, and it is thoroughly tested (meaning essentially no bugs), doesn't cram useless features into every crevice, and can have password free sites for when you don't want to make students log in to get their assignments.

Summary:
A normal course website: I hit the bookmark for my course, and then click the assignment I want and I get a PDF file. Two clicks. Always works.

Moodle: I go to moodle. If I'm lucky, Moodle is working, and I type my username, type my password, login, navigate through a bunch of features I don't need, click on my course, scroll past the newsfeed and the list of all students at the school who have logged in in the past few minutes, etc, then click the assignment. Then, I get the assignment embedded in a web page, IF the computer has a working plugin (which some of the school computers don't). Then, I can save the file from within the plugin. Why exactly is this better?

Caveat:
I've only dealt with moodle as configured at the LSE. Perhaps it can be set up in a more reasonable fashion elsewhere.

For some reason, the administration here likes Moodle too, and is still encouraging more professors to migrate to it. I haven't found a student here who has positive things to say about it, and while I have not personally TA'd a course using it, some of my friends have and seem to universally find it frustrating.

Could you please tell me why it sounds so appealing to administrators?

--[ snip] Caltech alumnus