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Moodle in Education
September 15, 2015

Moodle in Education

Denny Hammond | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Moodle

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.
  • Customizable - I have had the chance to explore many LMS providers and no provider seems to come close to the ability to customize as Moodle does. Since it is open source, anyone can build code to find solutions to challenges and share them with others. I am not sure there is a larger community working on any other LMS-type system.
  • Ease of use - the system is very easy to use for the end user. If organized properly, you can do just about anything that you might dream up.
  • Cost effective - Moodle is open-source and free. The only cost you might have is the cost of someone managing the administrative side and possibly add-ons that you purchase to enhance the experience of the end user.
  • Customer Service - If you would like customer service straight from Moodle, that is more challenging to receive. If you are ok with finding your own answers searching through Moodle forums and such, then this might be ok. It really helps to have an expert on staff that can manage the site and take care of the back-end logistics especially if you are a larger school/company. There will be questions and challenges that you would never imagine.
  • Starts as bare bones product- There are numerous ways to customize but you have to be willing to put in the time and effort to do it. The most basic product is not as dynamic as what other LMS options might be. However, given that, the upside can be greater.
  • Gradebook - One of the largest complaints we had from teachers was the way the Gradebook was set up. It is not user friendly and includes more technical pieces than it needs to share with an end user in most cases.
  • Positive impact technologically - It has allowed myself and other educators to explore the technological side of online education. Learning how to teach and teaching online are really two different things. Using Moodle allowed me to see and feel what the end user, in our case the students, were seeing and feeling. It takes hours on the back end to save students minutes/seconds on the front end.....and it was worth it since it was a matter of keeping the students focused on the content of the course rather than the technical aspect.
Moodle was great for its flexibility and ability to customize. Moodle is free. We used Moodle for many years, so we had much time to refine how we used it and overall it worked well for us.
This is well suited for schools that have a strong Technology Director and technology plan in place. Moving to this or any product requires an evaluation period to determine if it will meet the needs of that organization specifically.

Questions you might ask include:
1) What are your needs as a school or organization?
2) Do you plan to build your own content or import content from elsewhere?
3) What professional development will I need to get everyone off to a smooth start?
4) Does it work with the systems that you might currently have in place?
5) What level of support do I need from an LMS provider?