Moodle

3.10

3.10

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I absolutely don’t see how Moodle can be rated THAT high. It’s anything but super powerful. I tried it for my coaching program and was quite bummed that it doesn’t have a video chat or anything of this kind. I had to create a separate youtube channel and run workshops from there. The design is not too impressive as well, if that matters for you of course (which was my case).

I've been teaching with Moodle for two and a half years now and don't know what I used to do beforehand. It is a very powerful suite of tools for teaching, and the advent of Moodle 2 (despite having some changes that through a bit of doubt and confusion into the Moodle community, at least initially) has lifted it another notch. It is compatible with a number of other major pedagogical tools such as SCORM. It allows you to organise your units of work, present them in logical and attractive ways, embed multimedia, and keep tabs of student completion and marks. It also allows students and teachers to interact via forums and chat rooms, and for students to create their own bodies of information using tools such as the built-in wiki. This is far more than simply a data repository (as I have seen some argue of Moodle). It is a fully fledged, fully featured teaching machine that is being taken up by increasing numbers of primary, secondary and tertiary teaching institutions across the globe. And not just because it's free. Do yourself a favour and really check this out. Don't let the price full you. This baby sings!

I will add to the previous comment that Moodle does not support decimal grades AT ALL. You can't enter a grade of 95.5, for example. In addition, FORGET using Moodle on a class that has a 1000 point scale. Can you imagine the pulldown menu on a 300 point exam?

From an end user perspective, MOODLE 1.21 is on par with Blackboard 6 (which I have personally used for 5 online courses). From an installation perspective, MOODLE is probably easier than any product like it on the market. Geek rating of 3 out of 10. From a support perspective, MOODLE is just a little easier to maintain than WebCT Vista. From a customization perspective, MOODLE's opensource license allows freedoms that are specifically curtailed by the commercial CMSs. In terms of value, there is no contest. The price per month for our small institution from Blackboard equalled half the education pricing for a new server from Apple to host MOODLE. Let me repeat: $ of 2 months of Blackboard = $ of G5 + MOODLE(unlimited months). Wake Up People!

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.