Moodle

What is Moodle?

Moodle is an Open Source Course Management System. It can be used to conduct online courses as well as to supplement existing traditional classroom courses.

What are Moodle's features?

• Developed in PHP/MySQL
• First released in 2002
• Can support thousands of courses
• Provides so-called activity modules. Examples of modules are:

calendar, assignments, glossary, forums, databases, chats, grading and wikis

• The administrator chooses which modules to install
• Course listing shows all courses on the server making them available to guests
• There are tens of thousands of registered Moodle sites: as of October 2010 it had a user base of 49,952 registered and verified sites.
• Wide community support via Moodle's Community Website
• Users of the system are assigned a role which specifies their priviliges on the site:

Administrators, Teachers, Assistant Teachers, Students and Guests

• Allows for the creation of custom plugins
• Runs of GNU/Linux(a Debian package for Moodle exists) and Windows

Advantages of Moodle

• It is an Open Source System (released under the GNU Public License), which costs no money to implement and is being continually developed by a community of developers world-wide.
• A large number of modules are available and custom plugins can be developed

Requirements

• Needs to be installed on a web server.
• As any other system, it needs to be monitored and maintained.

Note

moodle.org provides a demonstration site with sample courses: http://demo.moodle.net/

introduction of Moodle to educators: http://moodle.org/mod/page/view.php?id=7736