jaitrichy: Moodle - Open Source LMS

Moodle is an open source e-learning platform (also known as a Course Management System (CMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)). It has a very large user base with 13,909 registered sites in 158 countries with 4,972,676 users in 455,685 courses (as of August 2, 2006).

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

Moodle features

Moodle has many features expected from an e-learning platform including:

Forums
Content managing (resources)
Quizzes with different kinds of questions
Blogs
Wikis
Database activities
Surveys
Chat
Glossaries
Peer assessment
Multi-language support (over 60 languages are supported for the interface)

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
Enrolment methods

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

PHP, an easy script language to learn, can be used to author and contribute new modules. Moodle's development has been assisted by the work by 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, including most webhost providers.

Data is stored in a single database: MySQL and PostgreSQL are currently the only feasible options, but work is currently underway to make full use of database abstraction so that other databases can be used just as easily (Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server are two specific target DBMSes). This change will be in Moodle 1.7 which is the next major release, planned to be released before the end of 2006.

Origins

Moodle was the creation of Martin Dougiamas, a former WebCT administrator at Curtin University, with postgraduate degrees in Computer Science and Education. Martin's later Ph.D.pedagogical studies examined "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within Internet-based communities of reflective inquiry" and this research has strongly influenced some of the design of Moodle, providing aspects missing from many other e-learning platforms.

Origin of the name

The word Moodle is actually an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, although originally the M stood for "Martin", named after Martin Dougiamas, the original develper.

To moodle is also a verb of unknown origin and infrequent use that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course.