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The reasons for choosing Moodle

15 January, 2016 - 09:49

OSS is rapidly developing, and new alternatives for non-profit organizations are emerging and maturing. Additionally, open-source learning environments such as Moodle are becoming widely adopted by university and educational institutions. Managing an LMS can be a complex task. Moodle does not hide this complexity and its detailed on-line help, examples and sensible defaults assist users in installing, administering and using the LMS. Moodle allows users to post news items, assignments, electronic journals and resources, and to collect assignments etc. The greatest strength of Moodle is the community that has grown around the project. Both developers and users participate in Moodle's active discussion forums, sharing tips, posting code snippets, helping new users, sharing resources and debating new ideas. Thus, we have chosen the Moodle software to be the area of study and analysis. We want to understand Moodle’s environment to explore its functionalities and limitations in order to develop practical examples of the use of VLEs over the world. We list here the most important reasons for choosing this package: (Dougiamas, 2011; Yuuichi et al., 2006; Berry, 2005; Zenha-Rela, et al., 2006; Cole,2005; Dougiamas, 2004; Chavan, et al., 2004; Koh, 2006; Williams et al., 2006; Itmazi, 2005; Shearer, 2003; Wharekura-tini, et al., 2004; MacKenzie, et al., 2006; Chao Su, 2005; Al-Ajlan, et al., 2008 and Massy, 2004).

1. Moodle is OSS, which means users are free to download it, use it, modify it and even distribute it under the terms of GNU;

2. Moodle is CMS & VLE, and lets teachers provide and share documents, graded assignments, quizzes, discussion forums, etc. with their students in an easy-to-learn manner and to create quality online courses;

3. Moodle can be used on almost all servers that can use PHP;

4. The key to Moodle is that has been developed with both pedagogy and technology in mind. One of the main advantages of Moodle over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy with good educational tools;

5. It works well with languages and is currently being used in 86 languages in 112 countries;

6. Users can download and use Moodle on any computer they have at hand;

7. It has excellent documentation, and strong support for security and administration and easy to upgrade from one version to the next;

8. It has many user-friendly features such as easy installation, customization of options and settings, good support/help and good educational tools;

9. It demonstrates the use of OSS in creating a high quality e-learning environment that incorporates many other subjects;

10. Moodle is the LMS most often recommended of all the OSS packages , as well as being the most popular;

11. The credibility of Moodle is very high. At present, there are 52289 web sites from 193 countries that have registered with it ;

12. The importance of Moodle is its good reputation according to good reports, grade of admission in the community and number of places, existing languages, etc ;

13. Moodle should be able to be used in conjunction with other systems. It keeps all files for one course within a single, normal directory on the server. Administrators allow the provision of seamless forms of file-level access for each teacher, such as SMB, FTP, and so on. Currently, there is work on more features planned for Moodle in future versions, such as export and import data using XML that can be integrated visually into other web sites. In addition, has presented a good solution for this integration, enabling more VLEs to work together by using Web services and related techniques (Al-Ajlan, et al., 2008);

14. Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Netware and any other systems that support PHP;

15. Data is stored in a single database: MySQL or PostgreSQL are best but it also supports Oracle, Access, Interbase, ODBC and others;

16. Some universities integrate Moodle with other VLE products, such as Oxford University which has integrated two OSS learning environments, Bodington VLE and Moodle although they are slightly different to each other.