Moodlerooms Supports LSU's Move to Moodle

• By David Nagel
• 02/15/08

Louisiana State University has signed on with Moodlerooms to provide support, hosting, and other services for its Moodle deployment. As we reported in November, LSU is replacing two learning management systems on its campus with Moodle, an open-source LMS/CMS popular in higher education and elsewhere.

The move to Moodle followed a two-year system review process headed by the university's Flagship Information Technology Strategy (FITS) Task Force for Teaching and Learning that gathered input from the entire campus community. Moodle, as of this writing, had nearly 16.7 million users participating in nearly 1.7 million courses at more than 38,000 registered sites, according to Moodle's published statistics.

LSU had previously been using both Blackboard and a home-grown system called Semester Book. Half the faculty on campus have been using learning management systems with their courses, and students were forced to use both Blackboard and Semester Book.

As part of the rollout, Moodlerooms, a Moodle partner service provider, will host the learning management system and provide training and other support services. According to the company, "The LSU Moodle will be hosted at a world-class hosting facility utilizing clustered, load-balanced enterprise-level servers. Moodlerooms skilled training and support staff will aid in LSU's transition and implementation of Moodle. As a Moodle Partner, Moodlerooms contributes a percentage of its revenue back to the Moodle project."

Moodlerooms also provides integration, customization, and course conversion services.

According to information released by LSU's Office of the CIO, the university expects to have its Moodle system fully deployed by fall 2008, with testing and course migration taking place this spring.