Item: Moodle
Rating: 8
Author: Charles Thomasset, MBA

Overall Satisfaction with Moodle

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Moodle is used both by students and faculty as the centralized space to share course-related information, assignment, grading, document repository, and activities.

Pros and Cons

Pros

It's easy to create various activities [assignments, videos, slides, files, quiz...]
It's easy to copy one course from past semester/cohort to a new semester/cohort, to avoid re-creating from scratch
It keeps track of student login times.
The quiz function is highly configurable: mix order of questions, mix order of choices, time limit, auto-correct + grade [save me a lot of time and let students take quiz online at home]

Cons

The grade book can be confusing and not working the way we want; some illogical tweaking may be necessary.

Return on Investment

Moodle replaced Blackboard about 4 years ago, mostly for financial reasons. At first, it was not as comprehensive as Blackboard; but recent upgrades makes it a competitive tool.
Open source allows the development of many plug-ins and integration with other software (i.e. Turnitin), offering additional functions to a tool that has plenty to offer from the start.
Without formal training, I was able to create my course from scratch and continually develop my content and knowledge base to share with my students, thanks to an extensive online resource.

I believe Moodle and Blackboard offer similar basic functions. I used Blackboard for one course and feel it might be more powerful, It all depends on how one uses a LMS for classroom learning and how much (offline) technology faculty wants to integrate in his/her course.

Likelihood to Recommend

Since Moodle is an open-source, the price (at least for higher education) is fair and attractive compared to alternative solutions. On the other hand, it might not be the best in class; security might be questioned; and assistance to implement/setup might be limited. Regular updates and debugging as well as training might go either way...
As for any software solution, make sure to understand the needs of the students and the faculty as well as other requirements. Although Moodle is easy to use, some students or faculty may not be as technology adept. Moodle (and other partners) has developed an extensive library of videos and training resources.

Using Moodle

Likelihood to Renew

Moddle does what I want so far, and I feel it has additional functions I could (should!) use to enhance my course.
The unknown in this review is about implementation, upgrade and maintenance resources and effort.

Comments

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Moodle review from an higher Education point of view (Faculty)