Although PASSHE recently announced that it has signed a five-year agreement with Desire2Learn (D2L) to replace Blackboard and e-College as the lone commercial PASSHE Learning Management System (LMS) provider beginning July 1, 2010, IUP will continue to transition and maintain Moodle as its fully supported LMS.
A Desire2Learn and Moodle FAQ was published to explain the impact of the PASSHE decision on IUP. However, there seems to be some confusion among university constituents.
To attempt to address the possible confusion, below are the facts that were also shared at the February 23, 2010, University Senate meeting by Provost Intemann:
- IUP’s Moodle implementation is nearly complete. IUP faculty members have shown outstanding support and cooperation with the move from WebCT. The Spring 2010 semester will represent the final semester for WebCT. The only exception will be Summer pre-session courses that conclude prior to May 31, 2010. WebCT will be generally inaccessible after June 8 and will be completely unavailable on June 29.
- IUP will be adding Desire2Learn as a commercial LMS provider at some point in the future. However, Moodle will remain a fully supported open-source LMS at IUP.
- IUP must move slowly in exploring Desire2Learn for a number of reasons. IUP support personnel are currently supporting both WebCT and Moodle and have committed to exploring Moodle enhancements during the first few months after WebCT is retired. There are a number of integration and migration issues that will take time after Moodle enhancements are completed that must be resolved before Desire2Learn would work with IUP’s environment at a level similar to WebCT and Moodle.
- If a faculty member absolutely believes he or she must use Desire2Learn and cannot use Moodle, IT Support staff will provide very limited support until such time that Desire2Learn has support and integration at a production level.
