MOODLE – The Backbone of Fully Customized Course Delivery
Posted on February 6, 2009 in Technology
At the core of the services provided by The Learning House, Inc., stands Moodle – a learning management system (LMS) that online education advocates worldwide praise for its ease of use and strength of structure.
Moodle is a fun-sounding acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. As described at www.moodle.org, the software is used to create “interactive environments where teachers and students can communicate and collaborate in educational ways.”
In 2001, Martin Dougiamas of Curtin University, Australia started Moodle, which was sparked by his “strong beliefs in the unrealized possibilities of Internet-based education.” He had an intense interest in the idea of social constructionist pedagogy, “which not only treats learning as a social activity, but focuses more attention on the learning that occurs while actively constructing artifacts (such as texts) for others to see or use.” Moodle’s open-source software makes source code available to the general public, thereby following Dougiamas’ desire to most ably spread online learning and its benefits.
Moodle’s infrastructure is large and strong enough to support thousands of fully developed online courses, but it is also suitable for less-intensive blended courses. It runs on Windows and Mac operating systems, as well as in many modes of Linux.
The following benefits are just a few of the numerous advantages of learning with Moodle:
- Availability of activity modules for the construction of collaborative course communities, such as Wikis, quizzes, surveys, assignments and forums
- Display recent changes in each course for easy-to-read updates
- Ability to generate a “story” of each student’s course experience, which contains activity and participation information along with postings, assignment results and other vital statistics
- Ability to easily switch from instructor to student role
- Ease of adding or changing Web links, documents and assignments
- Ability to organize information: grade book options include weighted grades, percentages, letter grades, partial credit, etc.
- Assignment options: upload single or multiple files, online text and offline activity
Numerous institutions have found price advantages and intuitive capabilities of Moodle over other learning models, including Blackboard and ANGEL. In fact, a June 2008 article in Education Week cited Moodle as “perhaps the most popular rival to the course-management system sold by Blackboard, Inc., the dominant company in the U.S. market for eLearning tools in higher education.”
While Moodle can be acquired at no cost, the development and upkeep of courses consumes significant resources. To ensure a smooth operation of the system and delivery of the course material, the full roster of online learning experts at the Learning House steps in to shoulder clients’ technical responsibilities. Our graphic designers, content and media specialists, and client development specialists work together with clients to craft a comprehensive online platform and ensure that Moodle fully serves their needs.
To improve our clients’ ability to customize their online courses, we are now in the process of upgrading all clients from the IntraLearn system to the Moodle platform within the next 12 months. The Learning House training department has added comprehensive Moodle training sessions which are available both on-demand and through live, online sessions.
We have received great feedback, positive comments and high satisfaction ratings from all of our clients who offered courses on Moodle in January 2009. We are working hard to ensure the upgrade to Moodle adds value to our client online course delivery and improves the quality of teaching and learning.
