This page offers a detailed consideration of the differences between Moodle and Wikiversity, including suggestions as to how each is best used.
| Moodle |
Wikiversity
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- Moodle's strength is as a virtual learning environment (VLE) or learning management system (LMS). This means that Moodle (or any other VLE/LMS) is good when a teacher needs to track and compare students' marks, or integrate quiz making with numerous different communication possibilities, both synchronous and asynchronous.
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- It is unlikely that Wikiversity's quiz extension could be developed in the direction of a VLE, with tracking of marks, for example. This is because a MediaWiki has a weaker (and different) concept of a user compared to a VLE. Trying to use quizzes as you would in a VLE would not play to Wikiversity's strengths.
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- Moodle and other VLE's are weaker when it comes to linking into knowledge and media resources.
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- Wikiversity's strength is its integration into what is probably the world's largest organised body of knowledge (Wikipedia) and media resources. It is easier to insert hyperlinks and media resources can be inserted into quizzes, allowing quizzes to integrate with the search for knowledge understood as an experience between learner and knowledge-base.
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- Moodle's quiz module is used well when it is used for higher-stakes testing, understood as teachers examining their students.
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- Wikiversity's quiz extension is used well when it is used for lower-stakes independent study or training, understood as providing motivation and feedback to learners on the journey through knowledge. Whether the learner answers correctly or not, and how many points are achieved, is a personal experience. The results of this experience could prompt the learner to read a new resource or to continue to a new page. Note that the feedback option can be used to reveal hidden hyperlinks, so that a learner's next step on the learning journey can be recommended on the basis of their performance in a question.
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- A good Moodle quiz will probably have a lot of well-worded questions which push the learner to the limit.
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- A good Wikiversity quiz will probably have well-designed questions (and fewer of them) with media and hyperlinks, integrating the quiz with the wider body of knowledge and with a learning journey through that knowledge. The quiz functions to add interest and variety to what could otherwise devolve into a reading exercise.
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- Quizzes cannot be built collaboratively on Moodle. The interface architecture discourages this. A Moodle quiz is individually created and collectively experienced (taken by many with comparison of results).
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- Wikiversity is a better environment for collaborative quiz development involving both teachers and learners. The learning journey built for the individual to experience can be a collective creation: collectively created and individually experienced.
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