Back to Moodle   What is Moodle?   From Moodlerooms   Moodle is Web-based Learning Management Software (LMS).  As such, it allows instructors to create, sequence and modify activities for their students.  An activity might be a simple resource (like a video, sound file, pdf file, excel spreadsheet, Web page, or word document), or an activity could be a multiple-choice quiz that grades itself. Moodle has flexible activities, providing different approaches for learners.   Are there other programs that are like Moodle? Tools like Blackboard, WebCT, eCollege, Sakai and Desire2Learn are similar in functionality. Other software offers features like online gradebooks or Web pages or calendars that show classes what and when work is due. Moodle bundles together several of these approaches into an easy and secure interface.  Each student logs into Moodle with a username and password and has varying rights and dialogues with her instructor and peers, depending on the way the instructor has organized the course.   What does Moodle mean and who made it? The word "Moodle" is constructed of "muse" and "doodle." Moodling is a process of creatively meandering through the various activities of a course, tinkering towards insight and creativity. One of the major reasons Moodlers love this software is that online communication allows for time and space to think before immediately responding. Moodle is an ongoing project created by Martin Dougiamas of Perth, Australia. The open source software code is available for free at download.moodle.org.  At moodle.org, an active group of educators and developers contribute daily to the evolution of the software. Moodle was created as a tool for pedagogical enhancement on a social constructivism chassis.     Is Moodle for me?

Online learning can be a rich prospect: online courses can offer profound advantages to instructors. Rather than trying to balance everything in the brief “class period” of a traditional day, an online instructor can create activities that stretch for days, encouraging more reflection from participants.

Improved communication

When students post words in a public forum in Moodle, they are developing themselves as authors. They are shifting from a readership of one instructor to a classroom of peers.

One of Moodle’s strengths is its ability for peers to privately rate each other’s work. Instructors can create custom rating scales like: I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point; or That idea makes some sense; or I wish I had thought of this idea. It only takes a few days of receiving feedback like this from sixty peers for an author to begin to understand that what he says matters and could be stated more clearly.

Instructors can also give private (or public) feedback to a post. A science instructor can expect very specific diction in lab discussions; a literature instructor might demand evidence for every assertion; a construction-site safety instructor might want every writer to quote protocol.

A Moodleroom can, therefore, promote and demand a higher level of communication from a participant than a traditional classroom. In a classroom discussion, it is impossible for speakers to receive detailed feedback from peers. In a Moodleroom, this feedback about communication can be an expectation of the course.

Equitable participation

In Moodle, all interactions and exchanges between people and resources are recorded and available for constant review. An instructor can see levels of participation at a glance from a log report. He might, thereafter, choose to send a friendly note requesting more (or less) activity from a particular student.

Likewise, an instructor might review a full report of a participant—or a full report of feedback that the student has received from the teacher. This review might trigger another note to the student, or a subtle shuffling of course activities. In either case, Moodle gives instructors tools to better understand how each participant is involved (or not involved) in a course.

Instructional Advantages

We see the constructivist pedagogy that animates Moodle as a way for students and teachers to become reflective about the way they learn and how their own vision of the world is constructed with the help of others. Online learning demands extra listening and articulation skills. We believe this extra effort may be the most essential element of any person's education. Further, we suspect that true communication, facilitated by e-learning, might be one of our best opportunities to dismantle cultural barriers. Supported by Moodlerooms, Moodle removes barriers to learning, and opens the way to attainment and equity of a new order.

Online and blended learning

Moodle courses can be designed as a 100% online experience or, alternately, your traditional classroom instruction can be supplemented to create blended learning environment. In a Moodle “room,” instructors create activities and give learners the time and virtual-space to collaborate and to provide thoughtful, detailed and un-compromised feedback. Moodle eliminates the idea of a “missed class” and if a participant misses a class, a Moodleroom can keep her in the loop. If an instructor needs to chat with a learner after hours, they can meet in an online chat room in Moodle, or carry on a discussion in a Moodle forum.

Create activities and sequence them

Moodle offers 12 standard learning activities, as well as a variety of resource options. A resource in Moodle might be an individual file (like MS PowerPoint or MS Word files), a movie, a sound file or a Web page that an instructor places in logical sequences. As the course progresses, these activities and resources can be altered, added, hidden, removed and re-sequenced. The activity might be a quiz on the Trojan War, or it might be a lesson on safety standards on a construction site. Activities can be automatically graded (like a multiple choice quiz), or require instructor feedback (like an essay due in history). Some activities are designed for instructors to interact with students and others focus on peer-to-peer interaction (like a forum discussion) or a class-constructed glossary or database.

Immediate instructor and learner feedback

Every time an instructor grades, rates or places a comment on submitted work, participants receive an email alert. This greatly reduces the lag time between submitting work and receiving instructor comments. If desired, learners can check their progress and scores at any time from within Moodle, as well as double check what assignments are on the horizon.

Calendars and reminders

A Moodle calendar integrates three levels of information: site events (assigned by the business or institution administrator), course events (assigned by the instructor) and personal calendar items (assigned by participants). In this way, a quick glance at the calendar will show participants what activities are pending in all of their Moodle courses.

Participant monitoring

Instructors using a Moodleroom can also view powerful log charts that indicate when participants visit the site, review resources, and then submit assignments. At a glance, an instructor can know who is missing work and send them an email reminder. Moodlerooms lets instructors focus on teaching, rather than shuffling paperwork or worrying about potential hardware or software issues.

Archive, transfer, translate and convert courses

Courses can be copied at any time and zipped into a simple archived file for safekeeping, and be used in any Moodle installation. An elementary teacher in Rochester, New York, can archive an interesting Moodle course and send it to a university in Brazil. To restore an archived course, simply upload it to Moodle and press the “restore” link. With Moodle, good ideas can be duplicated and shared. In fact, Blackboard courses can be converted to Moodle with only a few clicks. There is no need to re-create the course; simply place it into Moodle.

An agent of worldwide change and transformation

Given the fact that Moodle is freely distributed around the world and is being adopted and advocated at rapid rates by international communities like UNESCO, we sense that this is the time and tool that may change ways that schools, countries and cultures share and collaborate. For this reason, we have chosen to create a content-rich environment that gives more than it takes. We know our approach is different from the corporate tradition, but this difference inspires us every day to think about the seeds of good learning.