Using Moodle

What Makes Moodle Special?

Part of my day job is to administer a commercial CMS for a large university. I’ve been researching CMSs for a few years now, and I’ve become a huge fan of Moodle because it is open source, built on a sound educational philosophy, and has a huge community that supports and develops it. It can compete with the big commercial systems in terms of feature set and is easy to extend. Let’s take a closer look at some of these advantages and why they are important to you and your institution.

Free and Open Source

The phrase “open source” has become a loaded term in some circles. For those who are outside of the techie culture, it’s hard to understand what a weird and powerful idea this has become, and how it has forever changed the world of software development. The idea itself is simple; open-source simply means that users have access to the source code of the software. You can look under the hood, see how it works, tinker with it, or use parts of it in your own product.

So why is this important? For one, open source software is aligned with the academic community’s values of freedom, peer review, and knowledge sharing. Just as anyone can download and use Moodle for free, users can also write new features, fix bugs, improve performance, or simply learn from looking at how other people solved a problem.

Secondly, unlike expensive proprietary CMSs that require hefty maintenance contracts, Moodle costs nothing to download and you can install it on as many servers as ...