Successful eLearning with Moodle

Moodle is, without a doubt, the widely used LMS system by organizations of all shapes and sizes. It is indeed a great learning system in the world.

HISTORY OF MOODLE DEVELOPMENT

The development of Moodle started as a doctoral research by Martin Dougiamas from Australia. It has drawn a long list of developers who are devoted to Moodle enhancements. The use of Moodle Development is restricted to divisional, departmental or experimental use. Furthermore, among the Guild members in the education sector. Whether one works in education, the corporate sector or the government, one could not ignore Moodle’s penetration into the learning management system market. Although Moodle is not about to replace proprietary enterprise-wide products, such as SumTotal’s TotalLMS or Saba’s Enterprise, Guild members use and like Moodle a lot.

WHY MOODLE IS THE BEST LMS IN THE WORLD

With sixty-eight million users all over the world, Moodle is no doubt the most widely used LMS or learning management system by companies of all sizes and shapes. Yet, Moodle is not the best LMS in the world simply because it is widely used. Moodle is the best LMS in the world due to it’s highly-configurable, user-friendly and feature-rich learning platform. eLearning professionals are always on the lookout for new ideas as well as for successful online learning solutions, particularly cost-effective ones. The open source software community claims to have a low-cost, great system for learning or course management.

WHY ORGANIZATIONS CHOOSE MOODLE

In the recent report, members who tried as well as adopted Moodle report high satisfaction ratings, easy implementation, low costs, and use. Ninety-five percent of users indicated that they did not intend to look for an alternative solution. In a decade, Moodle already has attracted a big and diverse user community. There are 345 websites with over 10,000 users. The obvious appeal of Moodle is that it has the potential to create cost-effective online learning communities, in both rich and poor countries alike.

The reputation of Moodle in higher learning also stems from the values of the academic community of freedom, knowledge sharing, and peer review. Moodle helps educators build an effective collaborative online learning community with the use of sound pedagogical principles for a very minimal cost.

HOW EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS USE MOODLE

There are a lot of educational institutions that use Moodle, some on a very huge scale. A good example of a big implementation of Moodle is the Open Polytechnic in New Zealand. It has deployed Moodle across eleven and three universities, together with various Government departments and a growing number of schools. Open University is another example. It offers 900 hours of eLearning available on their new Moodle platform for more than 180,000 students..

THE ADVANTAGES OF MOODLE

Surveys describe various advantages and disadvantages of using Moodle. Moreover, advocates highlight integral advantages that include the following:

1. Higher security levels

2. Lower total ownership cost

3. Greater flexibility

4. Peer review

5. Audit ability and availability of code

6. Ability to customize through code modification

7. Technical support

8. Various capabilities and tools

9. Technical support

A lot of people state that cost savings is not the key advantage of Moodle, but rather it is access to different innovative tools that interface with the Moodle platforms. Others, such as the adherence to open standards and interoperability operation, roles and user management, use of innovative plugins and support from online communities of practice. Others like the big user community, which fosters quality, review, reliability, accountability, accuracy, collaboration and greater communication. Users of Moodle find that the breadth of available talented people is so great that they could communicate with a developer or download a patch anytime, anywhere. Moodle helps the education world set, follow as well as maintaining standards. Others claim that developers lead the way in eLearning technology innovation since they could work as a community with common interests and foster collaboration in pursuit of rapid development and knowledge sharing.

BENEFITS OF MOODLE FOR LEARNERS

The learning environment of Moodle is flexible, fast and adaptable. It provides a clear, simple view of all learning resources and activities for units, including assessment information as well as online assignment submission facility. Moodle has subscription tools for receiving information on one’s study, like calendar feeds one could add to MS Outlook, RSS feeds of forum discussions, email notification on forum discussions or marked assignments. A student could also set up the file picker of Moodle to tie into one’s account on services such as Google Drive and Dropbox. Moodle provides a flexible foundation for continued expansion and enhancement, which means that one could continue shaping it to suit the changing educational requirements of today. eLearning provides students with detailed, immediate feedback when taking a quiz and they could immediately see their results. Grades are centralized and accessible to students during class and easy for them to keep tabs of.

No doubt, technology has set the world on fire. Online learning is now possible, reaching even remote places in the world. Thousands of educational institutions worldwide are adopting eLearning system and thus Moodle Development is gaining popularity.