Harish Palaniappan's

Softwares like moodle, hotchalk, are helping teachers, course authors, academicians and importantly, students, alike.

Slowly, internet and broadband are becoming a cannot-be-ignored delivery model for providing education.

For example, in the UK high speed broadband is free for public (probably with limits of bandwidth or other conditions).. and UK universities have all opened up for video conferenced regular classes which are also recorded and delivered so students can catchup later if they missed a class "in session". Imagine!! .. its not just class notes that you can catchup if you missed, but the entire class in session, who was saying what, who were all present and ofcourse if you bothered .. whatever the teacher was saying. :o)

My last employer used moodle for delivering assignments, conducting online tests, and announcing grading scores .. for their fresh graduate training programmes.

Good thing is.. you could catchup with your favorite courses even if you are a full-time student at a college... and you don't have to stress it, because it is delivered online without the headache or reading another bulk of study material, doing another set of assignments, etc., and if the delivery model of your course is mostly online, then the costs should ethically be low since it puts less requirements of time and resources on the course provider's side.

moodle.com and hotchalk.com guys have allowed their services to be entirely free, which keeps with the drive to transform education.

moodle is much more advanced than hotchalk, and is best downloaded, installed and maintained by the college admins.. to enable their teachers and students to use it. There are quite a few software people who provide services on this part, and charge a very simple monthly fee from the colleges that use their website's moodle installation.

hotchalk is for the startup teacher ..best for schools that want to try internet to deliver assignments and homework. It is quick and easy to use than moodle.. possibly because it doesn't have so many features like moodle, so eliminates complexity in the user-interface.

If you are curious on why is moodle powerful than hotchalk.

moodle is open-source.. for techies it means anybody can see the programs written for moodle, contribute to improve it or add more features, just like doing social work. If you are my kind, then you might like the people behind moodle.

and hotchalk is privately owned, and provided as a free service.

Actually, we shouldn't be comparing something as big as moodle, whose audience is much more than schools.. alongwith hotchalk whose audience is the simple teacher at your school next door. They address two different but important sets of.. the new term that I have slowly started using very often.. 'stake holders'.