Why Moodle

Since we are content providers...Part of my day job is to research commercial LMS for my clients. I've been researching LMSs for a few years now, and I've become a huge fan of Moodle because it is open source, built on a sound training delivery philosophy, and has a huge community that supports and develops it. It can compete with the big commercial systems in terms of feature set and is easy to extend. Let's take a closer look at some of these advantages and why they are important to you and your institution.

 

Free and Open Source

 

First-it's FREE, the phrase "open source" has become a loaded term in some circles. For those who are outside of the techie culture, it's hard to understand what a weird and powerful idea this has become, and how it has forever changed the world of software development. The idea itself is simple; open-source simply means that users have access to the source code of the software. You can look under the hood, see how it works, tinker with it, or use parts of it in your own product.

 

 

So why is this important? For one, open source software is aligned with the community's values of freedom, peer review, and knowledge sharing. Just as anyone can download and use MoodIe for free, users can also write new features, fix bugs, improve performance, or simply learn from looking at how other people solved a problem.

 

 

We extend this with the concept "Safety is Not Competitive, It should be Shared", many of our clients create courses which we add to the course catalog at no charge.

 

Secondly, unlike expensive proprietary LMSs that require hefty maintenance contracts, Moodle costs nothing to download and you can install it on as many servers as you want. No one can take it away from you, increase the license cost, or make you pay for upgrades. No one can force you to upgrade, adopt features you don't want, or tell you how many users you can have. They can't take the source code back from users, and if the Moodle Creator decides to stop developing Moodle, there is a dedicated community of developers who will keep the project going. No Enron scenario..... 

 

 

Training Philosophy

 

 

Social constructionism is based on the idea that people learn best when they are engaged in a social process of constructing knowledge through the act of constructing an artifact for others. That's a packed sentence, so let's break it down a bit. The term "social process" indicates that learning is something we do in groups. From this point of view, learning is a process of negotiating meaning in a culture of shared artifacts and symbols. The process of negotiating meaning and utilizing shared artifacts is a process of constructing knowledge. We are not blank slates when we enter the learning process. We need to test new learning against our old beliefs and incorporate it into our existing knowledge structures. Part of the process of testing and negotiating involves creating artifacts and symbols for others to interact with. We create artifacts and in turn negotiate with others the meaning of those artifacts in terms of a shared culture of understanding.

 

 

So how does that relate to Moodle? The first indication is in the interface. While tool ­ centric LMS systems give you a list of tools as the interface, Moodie builds the tools into an interface that makes the learning task central. You can organize your Moodle course by week, by topic, or by a social arrangement. Additionally, while other LMSs support a content model that encourages instructors to upload a lot of static content, Moodie focuses on tools for discussion and sharing artifacts. So the focus isn't on delivering information, it's on sharing ideas and engaging in the construction of knowledge.

 

 

Moodle's design philosophy makes this a uniquely trainer friendly package that represents the first generation of online training tools that are truly useful.

 

 

Community

 

 

Moodle has a very large, active community of people who are using the system and developing new features and enhancements. You can access this community at http://www.moodle.org/ and enroll in the Using Moodle course. There you'll find people who are more than willing to help new users get up and running, troubleshoot, and effectively use Moodie. As of this writing, there are 14,000,000+ people enrolled in the Moodie community and over 30,000+ Moodie sites (1,000,000+ courses) in 112+ countries. The global community has also translated Moodie into 60+ languages.

 

 

The Moodle community has been indispensable to the success of the system. With so many global users, there is always someone who can answer a question or give advice. At the same time, the Moodle developers and users work together to ensure quality, add new modules and features, and suggest new ideas for development. The core team are responsible for deciding what features are mature enough for official releases and where to go next. Because users are free to experiment, many people use and test new features, acting as a large quality control department.

 

 

These three advantages - open source, social constructivism, and community - make MoodIe unique in the LMS space.

 

 

Feature Comparison

 

 

MoodIe also stacks up well against the feature sets of the major commercial systems. I've been investigating alternatives to Blackboard and WebCT for over a year now, and I've been very concerned about feature compatibility between any alternative and the current systems. If trainers can't do what they've been able to do with their commercial system, they'll reject an open source alternative immediately. MoodIe is the only open source system currently available that can compete with the big boys' features.

 

 

In fact, the educators in the developer community have given MoodIe some features that the commercial vendors haven't even thought of. That's the advantage of an trainer­ driven, open source system versus a marketing-driven, for-profit system.

 

In Table 1-1, A comparison of the features in the two leading commercial LMSs and MoodIe.

 

 

Table 1-1. Feature comparison

Feature	Blackboard	WebCT	Moodle
Upload and share documents	Y	Y	Y
Create content online in HTML	N	Y	Y
Online Discussions	Y	Y	Y
Grade discussions / participation	N	Y	Y
Online Chat	Y	Y	Y
Student peer review	N	N	Y
Online Quizzes / Surveys	Y	Y	Y
Online Grade book	Y	Y	Y
Student submission of documents	Y	Y	Y
Self-assessment of submission	N	N	Y
Student workgroups	Y	Y	Y
Lessons with paths	Y	Y	Y
Student Journals	N	N	Y
Embedded glossary	N	N	Y

You can see that MoodIe already has all of the major features of the commercial systems, and a few that they don't.

Of more interest is the number of installations and users served by the main LMS vendors, as the following table shows.

 

	Installations
SumTotal	1,500
Saba	1,100
Blackboard/WebCT	3,700
Moodle	30,000
Skillport	1,200

 

Moodle is a Winner!

 

 

Our Hosted & Pay-As-You-Go System

 

FREE Moodle LMS INCLUDED. Preconstructed courses... quizzes...training guides to start training now!

 

Open for Savings. First and foremost, Moodle is freely available. There are no site license fees – or fees of any kind. As new releases and enhancements become available, these are free as well. The savings to can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars – or more – every year.

 

Open for Scalability. Moodle is the right solution for the largest corporate client or for a single department. For global corporations or for small business units with multiple location. And, Moodle can scale as your needs scale; it and is "right-sized" all the time, for everyone.

 

Open for Learning. Moodle has much to recommend it as Learning Management software. The endorsement of hundreds of thousands of users. Its powerful intuitiveness. Its many features and functions that reflect a keen understanding of how trainers need to train, and trainees need to learn. Moodle open source software becomes the pathway to unlocked learning at an affordable price...it’s FREE.

 

Open for Branding. Easily Branded to your company ...many theme colors available to match your Corporate Identity. [Hosted]

 

Open for Unlimited Training. Unlimited training per employee for a price...no concerns about Per Session Charges-Train as often as needed.