Hi Patrick, The short answer to your first questions: we don't know. We are doing many, many things simultaneously right now. I think there was a general realization that no matter what open source solution was chosen, it was likely that at least some of the academic units might choose to run their own implementation because of the current culture, funding, and practice and the anxiety surrounding potential loss of control. We also thought that a significant number might not choose to run their own and that over time, as we gained experience with and trust in a common service, additional units might shift all or some functionality to the common service, for example, looking to the common service for myMoodle and project sites.
We are just beginning to set up a detailed planning team that will be working on these and other issues, including understanding and evaluating overall architectural options. There has been 100% acceptance of single sign-on as a goal and some level of commonality in look-and-feel. We know that additional functionality is coming in the next release(s) of Moodle. We need to get those installed and see whether the provide the “integrated” solution we need from the end user perspective. A student, for example, at a recent meeting talked about wanting upon login and get a list of all the new activity on all his course and project websites.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by “development resourcing”. Here's one take on it: We have a fleet of distributed developers, intended to request some level of core funding for full-time developers who could work off community-set priorities in collaboration with the distributed developers, and the very robust Moodle community of developers. The maturity of Moodle and its community also convinced us that although our use cases went beyond what was available last fall. We were likely not to face the types of costs some units had experienced with requesting new functionality from vendors of proprietary systems.
We're also looking to join a community of schools, organizations, and individuals who want to work on interoperability so that migrating tools among systems is not the recoding effort it is today. We know, already, that there are tools or functions in Sakai we want, for example, not to mention those in our own campus systems that need to be brought over to Moodle.
Please let me know if this does not address your questions adequately. Ruth
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