Sunday Aug 01

Moodle - Learning Management System (LMS)

Moodle is a free and open source e-learning software platform (also known as a Course Management System (CMS), or Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)). It has a significant user base with 38,896 registered sites with 16,927,590 users in 1,713,438 courses (as of January, 2008). Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that people can develop additional functionality. Development is undertaken by a globally diffused network of commercial and non-commercial users, streamlined by the Moodle company based in Perth, Western Australia.

Pedagogical Approach

The stated philosophy of Moodle includes a constructivist and social constructionist approach to education, emphasizing that learners (and not just teachers) can contribute to the educational experience in many ways. Moodle's features reflect this in various design aspects, such as making it possible for students to comment on entries in a database (or even to contribute entries themselves), or to work collaboratively in a wiki.

Having said this, Moodle is flexible enough to allow for a full range of modes of teaching. It can be used for both introductory and advanced delivery of content (e.g. HTML pages) or assessment, and does not necessitate a constructivist teaching approach. Constructivism is sometimes seen as at odds with accountability-focused ideas about education, such as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in the United States. Accountability stresses tested outcomes, not teaching techniques, or pedagogy, but Moodle is also useful in an outcomes-oriented classroom environment because of its flexibility.

Moodle features

Moodle has many features expected from an e-learning platform, plus some original innovations (for example its filtering system). Moodle is modular in construction and can readily be extended by creating plugins for specific new functionality. Moodle's infrastructure supports many types of plugin:

  • Activities
  • Resource types
  • Question types
  • Data field types (for the database activity)
  • Graphical themes
  • Authentication methods
  • Enrollment methods
  • Content Filters

Many third-party Moodle plugins are freely available making use of this infrastructure. PHP can be used to author and contribute new modules. Moodle's development has been assisted by the work of open source programmers [3]. This has contributed towards its rapid development and rapid bug fixes.

Interoperability

There are many dimensions to interoperability for e-learning systems. Moodle's interoperability features include:

  • Authentication, using LDAP, Shibboleth, or various other standard methods (e.g. IMAP)
  • Enrollment, using IMS Enterprise among other standard methods, or by direct interaction with an external database
  • Quizzes and quiz questions, allowing import/export in a number of formats: GIFT (moodle's own format), IMS QTI, XML and XHTML (NB although export works very well, import is currently not complete)
  • Resources, using IMS Content Packaging, SCORM, AICC (CBT), LAMS
  • Integration with other Content Management Systems such as Postnuke (via third-party extensions)
  • Syndication, using RSS or Atom newsfeeds - external newsfeeds can be displayed in a course, and forums, blogs, and other features can be made available to others as newsfeeds.

Our Mission

Open WebApps is focused on propelling business efficiency and profitability by assisting corporations in leveraging Open Source, web-based technologies.

Our professional and service oriented staff will help you deploy, integrate, and even train your people on these incredibly powerful, feature rich, secure and stable systems. Our solution and service offering is broad, extending through Sales / Marketing Automation, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions, E-Learning Solutions, Open Source Consulting, Custom Software Development & Support, and Training. We have the unified goal of bringing outrageous value to your business paradigm, by advancing harmony & intelligibility within your enterprise.