Introduction to Moodle
On a previous post, I talked about how to solve an issue when something goes wrong with a plugin installation in Moodle, but then I realized I hadn’t written a post about what Moodle actually is, so I want to take a chance and try to introduce the readers to this awesome tool as an eLearning environment.
Moodle is an open source Learning Management System (or LMS) that serves as an environment for companies or institutions to spread their eLearning solutions throughout their employees. However, that is the most basic definition and it doesn’t really make justice to what you can actually achieve by using Moodle.
As an open source solution, it offers a lot of flexibility when it comes to customizing your Moodle installation so that it fits your needs, given that the Moodle community is relatively big and users collaborate to make this tool more robust by developing plugins to add to its functionality or to even improve in terms of security.
Thanks to this collaborative environment, Moodle becomes more than an LMS, it becomes a talent management system, and actually, a social tool, in which users can interact with each other, managers can review the progress of their subordinates in different learning plans, and trainers can create live group sessions and even create events that are reflected in other users’ calendars.
In my years of experience using different kinds of LMS, I have noticed that rather than the tool adapting to the customer’s needs, the customer’s needs end up adapting to the tool, sometimes leaving outstanding items to be managed outside the platform. So, in my opinion, this is where the open source advantages kick in.
If you are in need of a specific functionality, you can either find it in the awesome Moodle plugin directory or you can even take the chance to program it yourself (or hire someone to program it). Either way, this gives Moodle very-close-to-endless possibilities to expand it and (the best part) share your own developments with others that are looking for the same type of functionality.
To have an idea of how Moodle can look like, here is an example of a recent Moodle customization that we did for one of our clients: https://anesthesiacme.ca/
