I teach an online class this term (GEOG 418). The syllabus, schedule of tasks, etc, which are the basic contract items with students, are at pages that I maintain at wou.edu. Here is the homepage for the class.
The discussion questions and the student responses are all through emails--from our respective wou addresses, so that we don't have to be concerned about any spam/blocking issues. I have a group distribution address for this class--so, students email to this one address (geog418) and we all get the messages.
I have started doing videos to clarify concepts. These videos I route through YouTube. I have set up a blog for the class, where I post my emails to the class and the YouTube videos. Just as any post here in this blog automatically is pushed out to your email addresses, which is how you are reading it now, I have set up my class blog to be automatically mailed to the same geog418 address. So, it is not that students have to check my blog as well--all they need to do is check their emails :-)
On top of all this, I have also set up the class homepage such that the latest two blog posts are automatically fed into that page. So, when you go to this class homepage, you will find the latest two blog posts also there.
The neat thing is that once I have set these up, there is no additional work for me because all these from different service providers work well and automatically with each other.
Thus, I am not sure whether I should invest time and effort to migrate to Moodle. If there are some serious advantages, please let me know and I shall certainly look into it.
ps: I don't have students also blogging because then I need to provide support for some kind of a "blogging 101", whereas no new learning is needed to read and send emails ....
