Today I took a break from my Mambo and Asterisk work to attend a regional coordination meeting. Had some interesting discussions on a variety of topics – including one on Learning Management Systems (LMS). A variety of software was discussed, including Blackboard (which we currently use), Educator (used by Florida’s virtual schools?), and Moodle. Moodle caught my interest, as it’s open source and apparently fairly widely used. A fairly comprehensive of LMSes is available here.
After a little poking around on their demo site, I’m very impressed with Moodle. There us a fairly extensive list of extensions and components and it looks like it could be a decent blackboard.com replacement for me. That’s good, as I hear our annual subscription for blackboard will be increasing substantially.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like anyone has successfully hooked Mambo and Moodle together with the same user base (or offered combined event calendars, etc.). Moodle supports LDAP auth, and now that there is a new LDAP hack for Mambo 4.5.1 it could be promising! I’ll post any successes I have ‘binding’ the two together.