A short overview of the Learning Management System Moodle. This is intended to help people to decide whether or not moodle will meet their needs. 14.07.2015 Added slide (33) about moodle cloud offering free hosted (but a little limited) moodle site to all-comers.

1. To moodle or not to moodle
...that is the question

3. After studying this learning object you will be in a
better position to decide whether or not moodle will
meet your needs

4. What exactly is moodle?

5. Moodle is a Learning Management System (LMS). It
facilitates the creation of online courses and the
management of learning and teaching processes.

6. Who is moodle for?

7. Moodle is powerful and flexible enough to meet the needs of
users from large universities to individual teachers or trainers

8. How much does moodle cost?

9. Moodle is absolutely free. However, users do have to pay for
site hosting. It is also 'open source', which means the user
has the right to change the program to better fit their needs.

10. What does moodle do?

11. Moodle facilitates site registration and also
affords control of course enrolment - you can
create cohorts, groups etc. in your courses

12. Moodle maintains course and student
records - including portfolios if required.

13. Moodle will also work happily with many
third-party tools and can be extended by
numerous user created modules.

14. Moodle provides teachers and administrators
with downloadable reports about student
activity and results.

15. Moodle allows teachers and course creators
to add forums, blogs and chats to courses.

16. Moodle lets teachers upload videos, audio
files, images, PDFs and presentations to
their courses.

17. Moodle affords teacher control over what
students are allowed to upload -
photographs, assignments, videos etc.

18. Moodle can also facilitate payments for
courses through its payment module if
required.

19. To see what else moodle can do check out
the moodle site.

20. How difficult is it to learn to use Moodle?

21. Moodle is a very comprehensive piece of
software and so it does take a little time to
master. Whatever some may claim, no LMS
is without a learning curve. However...

22. moodle has a very active user community
who are always ready to help newcomers.

23. There are also numerous free tutorials and
youTube 'how to' videos available.

24. In addition, some 'moodle partners' provide
'paid for' courses on using Moodle.

25. Moodle is designed to be used by teachers
and students, who, for the most part, are
'non geeks', and so it is not really that
difficult to learn.

26. Probably the best advice for the new user is
just to get on with it and play with your
moodle installation for a day or two.

27. Isn't Moodle ugly and boring?

28. Moodle is a highly functional piece of
software and early versions concentrated
more on this functionality than on looks. As a
result it got a reputation for looking less than
attractive.

29. The later versions of moodle are much
easier for the user to 'beautify' from within
the program and while beauty is very
definitely 'in the eye of the beholder' moodle
no longer deserves its 'ugly' reputation.

30. Is Moodle difficult to set up?

31. If you need to set moodle and its
dependencies up manually, then it is not a
job for the inexperienced. Luckily, this is
rarely necessary for individual teachers as
many hosting companies provide a 'one click
set up' for moodle so you can be up and
running in a few minutes. Institutions usually
have their IT people do the set up.

32. Moodle can be installed on any computer
that can run PHP and can support SQL type
databases. It can be viewed on Windows,
Mac, Linux, iOS and Android systems. This
means it will work on mobile devices.

33. STOP PRESS!
Those wonderful moodle people are giving
everyone a chance to try out moodle. Get
your free hosted site at
https://moodlecloud.com/en/

34. This is just a very light overview you should
register on and spend some time exploring
the moodle site and its forums.

35. Useful links
Moodle site
Moodle 2 Tool Guide for Teachers
Quiz Module
YouTube Video

36. That's all folks!