Thursday, March 2, 2017

From Blogs to Content Management

Lately I've spent quite a bit of time with Moodle, Office 365, and a few hours with WordPress in order to check some embedding tricks.

To be honest, I've never been a WordPress fan ...between others I'm not after its architecture, and I don't want to use custom markup instead of html.

As a wannabe e-Learning course author I've been pleasantly surprised by the good integration between Moodle and Docs.com, or even a sway including a classic presentation with an embedded Youtube video - practically a teacher without IT background can attend dozens of students free of charge.

The forms and quizzes provided by Office 365 could be used as feedback surveys, but Moodle's scales, gradebooks, question banks, assignments, workshops and other specific entities are complementing excellently with a general-purpose document authoring and a multimedia authoring software package.

Nowadays a teacher can feel overwhelmed by the multitude of software tools designed to make his/her activity more efficient, and an administrative assistant might also need half a dozen of CMSs for doing his/her job.

Stock management, billing & drop-shipping, website & SEO, team management & collaboration are the minimal toolset for a company doing online commerce, and the situation is not simpler in other industries.

With the advent of management systems today we have hundreds of online tools offering highly interactive, user-friendly solutions, and hiding as much as possible the complexities of their internal logics.

In such an environment I think there is not a good idea investing time and money in CMS systems, which require mastering a multitude of static templates (a template should be visually editable and self-explanatory) or big manuals describing dozens of counterintuitive workflows instead of visual, context-sensitive guides for novice users.