Moodle LMS, A Smart Choice for the Future of Your Online Courses
January 04, 2019
Moodle LMS, A Smart Choice for the Future of Your Online Courses
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Moodle
We have been using Moodle (since 2014) at Achieveit360.org as our membership area to host our online courses for the K-12 school market in character, leadership and social and emotional learning (for students and educators). We did purchase the Lambda Theme and had some help to customize this theme to make it look better, but the basic themes that come free are still much better looking now than they were 5 years ago. We are able to host as many online courses as we would like with videos, audio, and online PDF worksheets and anyone can access these materials quickly and easily. There is also a Mobile app for those who would like to access the materials this way.
- ADMIN FUNCTION: Customizable Site Design with Modern Easy to Use Interface: We use the Lambda Theme (purchased from Envato Market) but there are many free themes with a modern look and feel as well. I like that I am able to make the site look the way I would like and am not limited to the old way Moodle used to look. These days are long past, and I am proud of the look and feel of the site. I can also manage the user roles/permissions and what each user sees and does not see very easily.
- ADMIN FUNCTION: Mass Enrollment: If I want to enroll 1,000 students at a time, I can easily enroll or delete mass numbers of students by using a simple Excel spreadsheet upload. I can have a class copied, with students and teachers enrolled in a matter of minutes. I can also manually add students or teachers quickly when needed.
- ADMIN FUNCTION: Regular security updates to be sure your site is secure. Each time there is a new release, I am able to upgrade to the latest version. I do outsource this to a Moodle expert for time reasons, but many people I know do this easily on their own.
- COURSE FEATURES: Multimedia embedded throughout. I am able to quickly and easily add audio and video to each lesson for more engagement.
- COURSE FEATURES: Group Management: I can easily create classes so that a teacher can quickly login and see their class at a glance, and print reports.
- COURSE FEATURES: A more recent feature is the assignment module and grading feature when the teacher can write annotations and feedback directly in the browser.
- Virtual Private Servers: In order to have large numbers of students using the program at once, I did need to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server from Hostgator to give me more memory/space/capacity for use. There is a cost to do this and when I did not have students using the program, I didn't like paying the monthly fee for this. I am still searching for another way to handle larger numbers of students without having to use a Private Server.
- Stronger Representation from their Leadership Team: I do follow many of the Moodle Leadership team, and support communities they have set up and often send them messages (and they do write back). I wish they had a stronger representation (training programs) in the USA to really take Moodle to the next level. I have seen this starting to occur and it does take support from the users as well. I would love Moodle to be known as THE leader in open-sourced learning. I can see they also have this vision by reading their ROADMAP on their website.
- POSITIVE: I was given a contract to provide online learning services to schools and was able to quickly provide what educators were looking for. In the past, I used a platform that did not have the ability to group teachers with their class, or provide badges. This platform was designed for the classroom.
- POSITIVE: Since the portal is easy to use, and there are many users around the world, I was able to watch many online training courses to get up to speed with the set up and launch my courses. There were many free trainings, as well, I was able to find some paid training through Lynda.com to give me a more thorough training on the ADMIN functions.
- POSITIVE: The portal is professional looking with many functions beyond what I use. Some of the most well-known educational institutions use Moodle, so it helped with credibility.
When setting up our LMS in 2014, we started with a product called LearnDash that was not designed for the school market. When we moved to Moodle, we looked at Edmodo and went with Moodle for the cost to launch and get our courses up and running. We are a smaller company were looking for a cost effective solution that still had the functions we knew our customers wanted and needed. Moodle was the most established LMS for the school market and we are thankful to have started with this choice and stayed with them as each year it continues to improve.