Online teaching and learning has been in transition for its entire existence. The number of courses offered at a distance has grown rapidly. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Waits & Lewis, 2003), in 2000-2001 more than 56% of four-year colleges and universities in the United States offered distance education degree programs. Many classroom based higher education programs, which meet in person regularly throughout a semester, use online technologies as well. In San Francisco State University (SFSU), 70% of all courses use online technologies; some of these courses are taught in a traditional face to face delivery mode. Approximately 90% of SFSU faculty who use online technologies use the Blackboard Learning Management System (LMS) and the rest are engaged in a scalability test of an alternative to Blackboard, using a local installation of the open source Moodle LMS which SFSU calls "ilearn." This paper presents selections of the authors' experiences using the Moodle LMS for the first time in a recent semester at SFSU. The purpose of this paper is to provide a glimpse into some of the factors that may be important considerations as more universities transition from commercial LMSs to open-source systems such as Moodle. (Contains 7 figures.)