Moodle: Cheap and Easy to Use
Updated October 02, 2015
Moodle: Cheap and Easy to Use
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
1.9
Modules Used
- Courses, Blocks, Flashchat, Assignment, Forum, Quiz, Glossary, Resource
Overall Satisfaction with Moodle
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.
- It is Open Source, meaning the deployment is cheap, relative to other LMS systems considered.
- There is a TON of documentation out there and support from a huge community of users from universities, corporate and other not-for-profits
- There are later versions out (2.6) that solve problems and bugs of earlier versions and the interface changes are in favor of all users, (admin, facilitator and student)
- Users can create their own profiles, and courses can be protected with an Enrollment Key set by the course creator.
- It has a consistent interface that is fairly intuitive and easy to use.
- Forums have been greatly improved in the later version. I am in hopeful anticipation of upgrading from 1.9 to 2.6 soon, for that feature alone.
- Groups in 1.9 are clunky, but much improved, according to online users in later versions (2.2 and above).
- Restore and Backup are sometimes irregular to the point that you may want to save a basic copy of a course in addition to depending on backing up a course to restore as a new course moving forward.
- Not loving that we have to use a 3rd party for chat rooms (we use Flash Chat) and the chat history is stored in Moodle.
- It is a great benefit for our members to gain professional development.
- It is easy to get your facilitators set, regardless of their experience level.
- Support is easy, the bulk of my support work is helping users who have forgotten their credentials, and setting up Chat rooms in FlashChat.
Moodle's interface, although a bit antiquated is easy to learn and there is not a lot to it--this is a good thing when you need to hit the ground running from an administrator, facilitator and even a participant point of view. It is interesting because as I search the top 100 LMS's available now, I don't even see the other systems I have used in the past on the list--so I guess they aren't even worth mentioning. Moodle is on the list, (http://www.capterra.com/learning-management-system-software/) not as I thought it might be, so taking a look at some of the system's listed above Moodle, comparing cost, and ease of use would be recommended as you demo and make comparisons.
Using Moodle
165 - Course administrators, member participants and facilitators-- member volunteers and contractors. Our members serve in a variety of roles. Out of the 60,000 members, over 3,000 serve in some capacity, mostly for asynchronous learning components of our offerings. The one-hundred, sixty-five I mention are staff that have a hand in adminstrating the session and the teachers that lead them.
2 - Previous experience with Moodle is good. Our system admin has some PHP and server knowledge that makes him my resource. A general knowledge of what an LMS does is good, with the ability to troubleshoot issues as well as IT security measures to assist with the enrollment key and user credential policies is recommended.