Students may have noticed Moodle operating at a sluggish speed on the first day of class.Because of a bug in the code, Moodle, which was instituted in the summer, could not handle the number of students trying to gain access at once, said Sheri Thompson, Information Technology Planning and Communications officer.Information Technology Services officials cleaned the code late Monday afternoon, and Moodle should be back to capacity for today’s classes, Thompson said.”The hiccup in the code was causing a clog,” she said. “With the small number in the summer, we didn’t notice the problem.”The outage impacted the majority of students and professors, Thompson said.”We are in constant conversation with Moodlerooms and the Moodle community,” Thompson said. “They’re watching it, and we’re watching it. When we notice that something is wrong, we are immediately calling each other.”Both Moodle and Semester Book are available this fall, but Moodle will be the only course management system in use by January 2009. The University discontinued the use of Blackboard when the contract ended June 30.”Most [classes] have migrated,” Thompson said. “There isn’t a lot of content to Semester Book, and professors are finding they can do the same things in Moodle.”More than 600 classes converted to Moodle this summer.Moodle is more cost efficient, Thompson said, and will combine features from both Semester Book and Blackboard, giving students and professors a one-stop source.The software is free and licensing fees do not apply like with Blackboard. The $300,000 spent each year on Blackboard is now spent on the development and interchanges of Moodle.”We host Moodle, and we hire analysts and programmers to make changes to software to adapt it to LSU specifically,” Thompson said.Steven Pomarico, a biology professor who used Moodle in the summer, said he likes how the program can be adapted to the University’s student and faculty needs.”Normally the users have to adapt to the software and then wait for patches to fix bugs or new versions to make it better,” Pomarico said. “Since I started using, it has already become easier to use, and new features have been added.”Professors are able to post a variety of files such as Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Word documents, movies, text and PDFs.The number of available options may seem intimidating, causing some new Moodle users to be hesitant.”The terminology they use within Moodle is different,” said Christopher Gregg, biology professor. “It just takes time learning a new system and getting used to the quirks that are unique to Moodle after using Semester Book and Blackboard for so long.”Moodle’s large number of available options make it harder to navigate for some, but professors seem to be happier with Moodle, Thompson said.”Whenever you have more options, it does make it less easy to navigate,” Thompson said. “But as soon as professors have worked on it, they seem to be happier with it than the options in the past.”The University offers faculty training opportunities and reference materials through ITS. Thompson said she does not anticipate students needing special training, but the START program offers free software training.”We’re expecting there to be a few bumps,” Thompson said. “With thousands of students using this for the first time, we’re not expecting it to go perfectly.”Randall Hall, faculty liaison to ITS and chemistry professor, is a user of the product since the spring. He said students benefit the most from the convenience of a one course management system.Hall said the majority of professors’ complaints came from the former grade book feature used on Moodle this summer.”The old version could do a lot, but figuring out how to do just the things you wanted was difficult,” Hall said. “They have simplified the grade book to where it does only the stuff most folks want.”Rya Butterfield, chemistry graduate assistant, used Moodle for the first time this summer. She agreed the version was not user-friendly and had the most difficulty with grades.”In my course, grades were determined by the overall sum of points,” Butterfield said. “While I had no trouble dealing with straight forward grades, the functions designed to deal with extra credit grades and dropped quizzes were troublesome.”—-Contact Leslie Presnall at [email protected]