Moodle in German High Schools
The Dissemination of Moodle in German High Schools
The answer is clear: You don't know anything specific. But the research has revealed some things. Here are given the most important ones in brief:
- 10 or 11 federal states (Brandenburg refers to Berlin) provide schools with Moodle instances or only Moodle areas according to their ministries of education.
- Individual Moodle instance: Schools can use all the functions of Moodle (including administrative and organisational functions) on their own responsibility, as long as they are available within the core package or can be installed later on request.
- Moodle areas (e.g. the "Lernraum Berlin"): Schools or individual teachers can receive course rooms and work in them as trainers. But comprehensive functions (e.g. for school organisation) cannot be used. The functionality is generally limited to the installed Moodle core.
- The other federal states use paid solutions (Schleswig-Holstein: fronter = itslearning, Bremen: itslearning) or have already created their own platform (North Rhine-Westphalia: Logineo) or are still in the process of implementing their own learning platform (Lower Saxony: education cloud). Only Thuringia seems to be without a standard offer.
In contrast to the two federal states with a fee-based solution, the other states also see their offer only as an offer, so that each school can decide for itself which solution it wants to work with (if at all). Thus, different decentralised solutions may exist (e.g. other free LMS such as lo-net2 or paid LMS), but these are not centrally registered. So it's hard to say anything specific about the actual dissemination of Moodle in German high schools.
However, Moodle seems to be widely used at universities (this is also just an impression, which is based, among other things, on the budget constraints at universities). Accordingly, promoting Moodle (e.g. through a project like Callidus) at schools could help to prepare for a later university career. However, the administrative effort of a learning management system like Moodle is for many schools for various reasons hardly affordable. Should / may schools then be forced to use Moodle?