Moodle is the product name of a course management system that supports traditional, blended/hybrid, and online courses. It includes a more complete and robust suite of features than were available in IQ Web’s course home page. These features include forums (threaded discussion groups), online grade book, glossaries, wikis, and many more.
Moodle can also be used for assessment. Chairs can request a course to be setup that contain all students in their department for their entire time at Woodbury. Assignments can then be added that can collect material in each year, as well as be used to record assessment data.
Adoption
- 42,000 registered Moodle servers. 30% are K-12, 34% are universities/colleges, and 36% other organizations.
- Registered sites have over 2 million courses, 22 million users, 16 million individual resources uploaded, and 27 million forum posts.
- There are 300 sites with more than 10,000 users. Local users include San Francisco State University, CSU San Bernardino, CSU Humboldt, UCLA, and Valley Christian
- Moodle doubled its U.S. market share last year (from 4% to 10%), and is now the largest CMS in the U.S. after Blackboard/WebCT.
- 73 translations of Moodle are available, including everything from Uzbek, to Thai, and Tagalog. .
Features
- Moodle was created to provide a student-centered, cooperative, and interactive CMS. It emphasizes ease of use, flexibility, and is focused on increasing student intrinsic motivation.
- Includes simple tools like IQ Web, but also more complex ones like quizzes, online assessment, threaded forums, flexible grade books, SCORM (importable / exportable content), journals, Web Quests, glossaries, online library, and a range of online communication methods.
- Moodle’s open source nature makes it is much easier to integrate other systems into it. A number of different portfolio systems integrate with Moodle.
Open Source
- Open source means reduced operating costs. Using a commercial CMS, we would use the low-end “basic” version. With Moodle, everyone gets the same features.
- We are not dependent upon a single vendor for support. There are a number of Moodle providers we can bargain with for support.
Documentation:
Training Sessions:
A number of training sessions will be held in Fall '09.
1. Support: