What is Moodle?

Moodle is a Learning Management System which enables you to organize your courses and course contents, as well as offer training tools, track learner progress, and administer many facets of your eLearning environment.

Moodle favours a social constructionist pedagogy, which essentially means that it enables your organization to offer both structured and formal training as well as a more informal learning environment where knowledge sharing can occur via such modules as forums and wikis.

Moodle is an open source application, which means it’s free to use. You are allowed to copy, use and modify Moodle provided that you agree to provide the source to others and not modify or remove the original license and copyrights, and apply this same license to any derivative work. Documédia can offer guidance on this matter.

Moodle Installation, Implementation and Customization

Documédia can assist you in installing, implementing and customizing Moodle to suit your needs as well as developing eLearning content for Moodle.

• Moodle installation requires you to run a PHP server and a MySQL database. Both of these are free. Documédia will work with your team to ensure a rapid and easy installation.
• Moodle implementation begins with a 1 to 2 day training process with your team. The goal is to help you determine roles and responsibilities within your organization as well as develop a process to ensure that Moodle is configured in a standardized manner and in accordance with your specifications.
• Moodle customization is the process by which Documédia creates a Moodle theme aligned with the graphic look and feel or your organization and/or training program.
• Moodle eLearning content development requires that you first have a training program detailing your instructional strategy and objectives. The next step is to storyboard your content. Documédia has the expertise to assist you in this process as well as develop learning objects that respect eLearning norms and standards to be distributed via Moodle.

Click here to view a sample Moodle installation and customization

Moodle Buzz!

Moodle was a finalist in the "Best Linux / Open Source Server Application" category at the UK Linux and Open Source Awards 2005.

The Open University selected Moodle the learning management application for its upcoming educational program to be launched in May 2006. This initiative will be the largest use of Moodle in the world. Furthermore, Athabasca University , the most important distance education university in Canada, has adopted Moodle as its primary vehicle for online teaching.

In October 2005, Learning Circuits, a leading eLearning journal, published an article reporting that open source systems are definitely taking a good part of the market share in eLearning. They mention Moodle as one of the leading open source LMS.

According to a study presented by Graf and List in July 2005, when compared to eight other open-source Learning Management Mystems, Moodle proved to be superior in terms of adaptability. Graf and List evaluated each application on the following four components:

• Adaptability of the application, which deals with the ability to customize the platform for the educational institution’s needs (e.g. the language or the design). Moodle was deemed superior to all the other applications being evaluated.
• Personalization aspects, which indicate how easy it is for individual users to customize his/her own view of the platform. Moodle does offer personalization to a certain degree. It also enables an organization to set the degree of personalization that it will allow.
• Extensibility is the flexibility needed to modify source code. The way in which Moodle is developed and documented allows for quite a bit of flexibility. In fact, this is Moodle’s strongest point.
• Adaptivity refers to all kinds of automatic adaptation to the individual user’s needs. In this instance, Moodle ranked lower than other applications, but still performed well.  

Please contact us to discuss your requirements.

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