Moodle - Course Management System (CMS)

Moodle is a free and open source e-learning software platform (also known as a Course Management System (CMS), or Learning Management Systems (LMS), or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)). It has a significant user base with 38,896 registered sites with 16,927,590 users in 1,713,438 courses (as of January, 2008).

Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that people can develop additional functionality. Development is undertaken by a globally diffused network of commercial and non-commercial users, streamlined by the Moodle company based in Perth, Western Australia.

Features

Moodle has many features expected from an e-learning platform, plus some original innovations (for example its filtering system).

Moodle is modular in construction and can readily be extended by creating plugins for specific new functionality. Moodle's infrastructure supports many types of plugin:

 

Activities

Resource types

Question types

Data field types (for the database activity)

Graphical themes

Authentication methods

Enrollment methods

Content Filters

Many third-party Moodle plugins are freely available making use of this infrastructure.

PHP can be used to author and contribute new modules. Moodle's development has been assisted by the work of open source programmers. This has contributed towards its rapid development and rapid bug fixes.

Specification

Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, Mac OS X, NetWare and any other systems that support PHP and a database, including most webhost providers.

Data is stored in a single database: Moodle version 1.6 could use MySQL or PostgreSQL. Version 1.7, released November 2006, makes full use of database abstraction so that installers can choose from one of many types of database servers (Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are two specific target DBMSes). The current version of Moodle (1.9), was released in March 2008.

Write a review

Your Name:


Your Review: Note: HTML is not translated!

Rating: Bad            Good

Enter the code in the box below: