Moodle
| Installation |  |
| Built-in features |  |
| Security management | |
| Performance | |
| Editorial Features | |
| Themes & templates | |
| Plugins & extensions | |
| SEO friendliness | |
| Multilingual support | |
| Ease of use | |
| Support community | |
| Publisher | : moodle.org |
| Latest version | : 1.9.6+ |
| Platform | : PHP |
| License type | : GNU |
| CMS type | : course & learning management |
The name Moodle is actually an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, although originally the M stood for “Martin’s”, named after Martin Dougiamas, the original developer at Curtin University, Australia.
It is a free and open source e-learning software platform, also known as a course management system, learning management system or virtual learning environment. It is basically designed to help educators create effective online learning sites with opportunities for rich interaction. It is a global development project designed mainly to support a social constructionist frame work of education. It’s basically copyrighted, but with few additional freedom. Development is usually done by globally diffused network of commercial and non commercial users.
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Main features
Moodle has many features that are expected from an e-learning platform, plus some original innovation. It has features that allow it to scale to very large deployments and thousands of students. It can also be used for primary institutions. Many institutions can use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, deliver content to students and giving assignments and quizzes.
Moodle infrastructure support many types of plug-ins such as activities, resource types, enrollment methods, content filters, graphical themes etc. By default moodle has TCPDF library that allows the generation of PDF documents from pages. Moodle can be installed on any system that runs PHP and can support SQL type data base. It can be run on windows and MAC operating system and many forms of Linux, there are many knowledgeable moodle partners to assist and help host own moodle site. In moodle data is stored in a single database. Moodle version 1.6 could use MySQL or PostgreSQL. Version 1.7 makes full use of database abstraction so that installers can choose from one of many types of database servers (Oracle and Microsoft SQL).
Open source programmers have contributed a lot in development of Moodle. This has helped in its rapid development and bug fixing. It has helped many organizations to explore e-learning with minimal risk. It has become a huge user and development community, online education, with no real competitors or similar products, and is extremely powerful.
Developer(s)
Martin Dougiamas created moodle at Curtin University, Australia. The wiki part of the software was taken from Erfurt wiki.
Rahul wrote:
I honestly can’t see why so many people are making a fuss over moodle. It looks pretty on the outside, but when you dig a little deeper (i.e. actually start using it to run a course), it becomes obvious that it is missing many, many, features found in more fully developed course management systems.
For example, the chat capability is basically a CGI program that has the web browser constantly refresh itself to update your view of the chat. As another example, you can only issue the one or two built-in surveys that come with the software – you cannot develop your own. And, last I looked, you can’t attach files to forum messages!!! No concept of combining students into groups… and so on…
On top of everything else, as a PHP/MySQL CGI program, Moodle is very sluggish on all but the most high-end systems. If you wade through the very active list at the moodle site, you’ll find that most people are looking for help getting the thing running adequately on their systems.
Overall, Moodle is not ready for prime time, although the author deserves an A+ for agressively marketing Moodle and himself. Very nice logo, and you can buy T-shirts and coffee cups!
I have used Moodle for a year and a half. I started offering it to the rest of my department this fall and they love it. The author was a distance learner himself and understands what is needed and what is not. It accomodates a variety of teaching styles, levels of interactivity, and methods of evaluation.