Choosing Moodle As Your Learning Management System: Why Do It?
Moodle is the world's most popular open source Learning Management System backed by a strong community. Since its initial release in 2002, Moodle users have grown leaps and bounds in all countries and across all sectors. Despite having a lot of competitors, it remains the best open source LMS around the world because of its strong community and pedagogical design. The other reasons to justify the selection of Moodle as your preferred LMS are:
1. Truly Open Source
Moodle is free to use for everyone; you needn’t pay even a single penny for using it on your servers. However, if you need the servers or any services like customization, designing, etc., you need to pay for that. You are free to take your data and move your LMS to any other platform. You are nowhere bound neither with your data nor with any specific company.
2. Sound Educational Philosophy
While tool-centric LMSs give you a list of tools as the interface, Moodle builds the tools into an interface that makes the learning task central. Moodle is built on Social Constructionism pedagogy, including the tools which are truly required in an online learning environment.
3. Proven And Τrusted Worldwide
Powering around 80k websites all over the world, Moodle is trusted by institutions and organizations large and small, including Shell, London School of Economics, State University of New York, Microsoft, and the Open University.
4. Designed To Support Both Teaching And Learning
With over 15 years of development guided by Social Constructionism pedagogy, Moodle delivers a powerful set of learner-centric tools and collaborative learning environments that empower both teaching and learning.
5. Easy To Use
A simple interface, drag-and-drop features, and well-documented resources along with ongoing usability improvements, make Moodle easy to learn and use. With latest Bootstrap 4 based themes like Fordson, Boost, etc., the default Moodle looks are awesome and easily customizable.
6. Always Up-To-Date
The Moodle project’s open-source approach means that it is continually being reviewed and improved on to suit the current and evolving needs of its users. There is a new version release after every 6 months in May and November. The most recent version, i.e. Moodle 3.3, was released in May 2017 and the next version Moodle 3.4 is due to be released in November 2017.
7. Community Support
Moodle has the biggest community of developers, teachers, and designers working all around the globe for making improvements to the product named Moodle. In 2015, Moodle Users' Association was formed to facilitate the individual Moodle users to propose and participate in adding new features into Moodle core.
8. Great Documentation And Forum Support
One of the basic things missing in most of the other open source LMSs is the lack of appropriate documentation, whereas Moodle is the winner in terms of the documentation also. You will find tonnes of documents on each and every topic related to Moodle; if by chance you are not able to find any relevant topic, then you can ask the community members to help you out through Moodle forums.
9. Highly Flexible And Fully Customizable
Because it is open-source, Moodle can be customized in any way and tailored to individual needs. Its modular setup and interoperable design allows developers to create plugins and integrate external applications to achieve specific functionalities.
10. Language Options
Moodle is available in all of the popular languages so that you can teach students in your own language. Even you can also contribute to translate Moodle into your own language. As on date Moodle has been translated into 126 languages for the 3.3 Version.
11. International Standards Compliant
Moodle has achieved and is compliant with the following international standards:
- Open Source Initiative (OSI).
- IMS LTI™ Certified.
- SCORM-ADL compliant.
- Open Badges.
12. Interoperability
In supporting the seamless integration and use of content from different sources and multiple vendors, the Moodle platform is designed to exchange data using open industry standards for web deployments and supports.
