Moodle Reviews

I have been using Moodle mostly as a student at EuNC, but recently I have been helping the new teachers get the hang of the system and find out its opportunities. I love Moodle for having a web version as well as a mobile version because it helps me study wherever I am (especially during long commutes) and it's easy to use for the teachers as well because there are numerous features for various needs (for example, you can set other students' forum posts to show up only after you've created a post of your own as a student, therefore minimizing the temptation to read what others have written first and only then writing your own answer).

Moodle is the main LMS on campus. It is used as a landing board for instructional courses, storing online trainings, accessing job aid material, viewing panopto videos, etc.

Moodle is the learning management system for our entire campus of around 1300 students and 100 faculties. All courses taught are created within Moodle, and Moodle provides an online space for faculty to share content and expectations, communicate with students, engage students in online discussions, and provide grades and feedback to students.

At our medium-size public university, we used it first as a secondary LMS in a pilot phase and then for 2 full years as our primary LMS. We have since migrated back to Blackboard. We used it to provide course shells for all courses on campus during the years it was our primary LMS.

Moodle is being used across the agency to develop and deliver education to all staff. In the coming months, with an ecommerce integration, we will be using Moodle to deliver education to volunteer staff and external partners.

Moodle is being used across our university by all of our instructors. They are geared toward putting their syllabus up in each of their courses. We have approximately 2500 courses that run in the summer and in the fall. We also use it exclusively for our web courses for our adult learning programs. We do have the business problem of the budget that it addressed. It is an open-source management system which is basically free for our university to use. We were paying nearly $60,000 for the prior learning management system.

At AmericanCybersystems we use Moodle as our training portal. We load all of our online training courses, our quick reference guides, our knowledge base articles, and our instructor led courses into the Moodle platform. Our training department is very small with only three members: the VP of HR, the Director of Training (me), and an Instructional Designer/Trainer. However, we are creating training at a fast clip and need a learning management system (LMS) that can keep up with the amount of content we want to put out, track the learners, and display the information in a clear and useful way.

American Cybersystems is an international staffing and solutions company. This means we have an accounting department, a billing department, vendor managers, recruiters, salespeople, customer service associates, and a solutions group. Our training department is responsible for the learning and development of the entire organization. There are many different skill sets that have to be taught and therefore there are several different mediums our training department likes to use in order to maximize the training effectiveness. Moodle has several different supports for all the different learning objects we like to use.

Every course at the college receives a Moodle shell. Moodle is used extensively by 85%-90% of our faculty, and minimally by the rest. 100% of our student body uses Moodle for their courses. All new hires attend a workshop on using Moodle and the expectations of the college that everyone be at least a minimal user.

At my prior college, Moodle was used as the Course Management System, somewhat in conjunction with Campus Technology's CampusCruiser email/courseware offering. The two systems were not integrated, requiring a duplication of content. Both Moodle and Campus Technology offered online file storage and online calendar. CampusCruiser served also as email, in conjunction with the usual PIM stuff somewhat integrated (a calendar, tasks, email, contacts). Moodle had online file storage but only in connection with a specific class. Content shared between multiple sections of the same course required duplication, manually importing each file. This overlap typically caused confusion among students and instructors alike, creating even less consistency between courses and instructors than a typical LMS alone.

Many Moodle features were useful, including the ability to stage content with MultiMarkdown or plain text formatting. Other products often present either a MSWord-type interface or a raw HTML editor. AFAIK, Markdown content wasn't directly uploadable and converted, but had to be composed in (or cut/paste into) a text edit window.

Moodle has a number of open source modules that looked interesting, but I have not directly used them. These include integration with the content management system Drupal. Moodle's weakest point would seem to be the management of content, something which is readily solved with a CMS. In my opinion, a learning management system without adequate Content Management support somewhat defeats the purpose of a true LMS, since content can easily go stale without adequate management tools to update and leverage content across multiple courses.

Rubrics are present, but the management tools for rubrics are inadequate. Most grading criteria should be reusable across courses and instructors, for consistency. Using rubrics in Moodle seems to result in their being duplicated for each assignment, which became unmanageable across 4 classes with a couple dozen graded tasks per course. Rubric management for assessing instruction quality does not appear to be present in the default installation, but would be strongly encouraged. You do use consistent criteria for grading each assignment, right?

More advanced LMS features such as adaptive release for learning content, SCORM integration are present, but awkward to use. Moodle isn't a content creation or content management tool, and default integration is cut and paste. Adaptive release and SCORM content are very prohibitive without effective tools for creating content.

Like most open source projects, Moodle is free, as in the same sense as "free puppies". For a budget-strapped organization, free is very appealing. Keep in mind that the product doesn't run itself, so adequate staff skill is required to keep it running. The real value of Moodle would seem to be in customization to integrate with the organization's existing IT assets. If you don't mind learning an API and writing PHP code, there is an extensive amount of customization possible, that commercial products like Blackboard do not allow. If adopted, Moodle support and maintenance must still be budgeted.

For a non-education sector use, I believe Moodle is still a valuable asset, if used in conjunction with a content management system and adequate staff support. Alternative tools I've previewed seem to be excessive and less economical in terms of delivering instructional content. Internal training is necessary in all organizations, and an inch thick employee manual isn't always the best way to accomplish this. But, building useful learning content is a skill in itself, but a valuable one to develop.

Moodle is currently being used by our department to manage faculty development opportunities across campus. While we have not adopted it across the whole university it is a helpful, free tool to ensure our faculty have access to the opportunities they need in order to continue their own teaching and learning endeavors.

We use it to manage the courses that we deploy through our website for professional development of our members, mostly librarians. It is used by a dozen divisions of our organization. It enables librarians to participate in professional development remotely.

Moodle is used across the entire organization. It is available to students for every course and available to faculty and staff for committees and group projects. It enables faculty to communicate with students online, post assignments, share notes and multimedia presentation, record grades, etc. It enables committees to share information in a protected environment.

Moodle was used across the institution to support both online and traditional courses.

Moodle is used to track the training delivery of state employees who are part of the Medicaid Team. It offers a onestop shop for online training modules, and reports scores to managers.

Moodle is our university LMS and has been used across the whole institution for the past 6 years. In addition to being used to deliver student orientation, it is also used to support face to face class delivery and to manage students who are in various rotations across the Pacific Northwest. Moodle also facilitates student clubs and other learning activities outside the classroom.

We use Moodle every day in a number of different ways. It functions as our Learning Management System campus-wide. We have a few different instances of Moodle set up for students and faculty, administrators and prospective students. It allows our faculty members to easily organize coursework and administer assessments online, which enables them to use their in class time more effectively, as well as reducing cost and waste associated with paper handouts. Another benefit is for our students, who have shown a strong preference to being able to access all of their content online, whether by computers on campus or on their own mobile devices.

We use Moodle to deliver our professional development courses for K12 educators, both for online courses as well as face-to-face training. We've found that for us it offers the widest range of options for an LMS, and has been employed to serve a variety of needs, both for us and our clients.

We used Moodle as our Learning Management System for kindergarten through twelfth grade at our school. We also used it as a professional development tool for our teachers. One great advantage of Moodle is it being open source. This allows for an organization to format their site just about any way they can dream if they have the right people helping. Not to mention it is a fairly cost effective solution.

Our school system is using Moodle in two ways to address different issues. First, classroom teachers are using Moodle to extend their classroom beyond the four walls of the school building. Assignments, content and enrichment activities are available to students in an any time/any where environment. Second, the school system uses the Moodle environment to offer several courses during the summer months in a completely online environment. Students can take courses to meet requirements, get ahead or even graduate early. The Moodle environment is available to any faculty and staff wishing to utilize it.

We are a private liberal arts college and use Moodle on campus and in our online program. Our instance of Moodle is hosted by MoodleRooms. I work primarily with the online education sector of the college and thus will respond from that perspective. We currently have over 600 students taking online courses and lead our tech support section for students and faculty. Moodle meets our needs for student engagement, tracking of activities, and of course grading.

Once a SCORM package (training) has been added to Moodle, there is little administrative work to be done.

Mostly it's used by me as a supplement to scoring and guided learning. The problem it addresses is we need a long-term database of scores, an easy-to-repeat format to get the same quizzes and tests up, and a database of the users and how results improve over time.

Granite State College (part of the University System of New Hampshire) has over 70% of its credit enrollments as fully online, in both undergraduate and graduate studies programs. We support over 3000 students and about 200 faculty. We rely on Moodle exclusively as our LMS. It is hosted through Remote Learner, but we have a fulltime Moodle engineer. Our engineer is a programmer and experienced systems administrator from prior professional IT experience, and she is also a PhD candidate in studies related to teaching and learning with advanced digital systems. It is fair to say that we have maximized as much as we can from Moodle, given the limitation imposed on us by Remote Learner (we cannot implement certain features independently).

Our mission is to deliver high quality online learning experiences for degree-seeking adult learners (median age: 35, more women than men, most working fulltime + families). Moodle enables us to achieve this in a financially feasible way compared to the costs associated with Blackboard.

Moodle is being used as the primary learning management system (LMS) at Columbia College Chicago. The user base is in excess of 10,000 active users across all departments including academic (for courses) and administrative (for learning communities and resource hubs). Moodle allows faculty and students to work together effectively whether teaching face to face, flipped, hybrid or fully online. Because of the flexibility of the software and dynamic developer (open source) community, Columbia has been able to adapt the installation to a variety of needs with minimal resources. Moodle has proved mostly reliable except when starved of ram or hard drive space as is the case with any LMS.

The University of Minnesota adopted Moodle in 2008 with an implementation of Moodle 1.9, while concurrently running the Blackboard system, WebVista. In 2012, we completely decommissioned WebVista in favor of using Moodle as our primary course management system.

Moodle is used by our four coordinate campuses, including Crookston, Duluth, Morris, and Rochester/Twin Cities. Across all campuses, Moodle is used with approximately 65% of all courses, and approximately 70% of all enrolled students use Moodle for at least one course.

In addition to our academic use of Moodle, it is also used by departments across the University for employee training, housing and sharing resources easily within departments, and in some academic units for tracking promotion and tenure materials for their faculty.

Blackboard was an expensive course management system, and during the recession in 2008 the University was looking for ways to cut costs as much as possible. Moodle was a clear choice as a course management system because it is an open source software with an active development community, which allowed our developers to seek fixes and enhancements developed by other institutions, as well as providing our own back to the community.