Designing oline learning communities for higher education: possibilities and limits of moodle

Since February 2007 the labINDIA - laboratorio Innovazione Didattica Accademica (i.e. Innovation in Higher Education laboratory) of the University of Trento' participates to a National Interest Research Program (PRIN) to analyze possibilities and limits of the open source Course Management System (CMS) Moodle, when used for designing and implementing online learning communities. Although Moodle offer many tools to promote collaborative learning, we think that some of them should be improved in order to fully exploit the more innovative web 2.0 idea. This paper aims to present early results of our research, to share with Moodle Community the problems aroused in designing and delivering a higher education course based on social constructivism, the solutions adopted to overcame the limits encountered as well as to propose some hypothesis for future Moodle improvements.