Moodle (Course Management Systems)

Introduction

What Is Moodle?

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Moodle is an open source Course Management System (CMS) that universities, community colleges, K–12 schools, businesses, and even individual instructors use to add web technology to their courses.

Moodle is a free, Open Source software package .

Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 753,983 registered users on this site alone, speaking over 85 languages in 202 countries.

More than 37,184 educational organizations, with 25 million users in 2.4 million courses (as of September 1, 2009). around the world currently use Moodle to deliver online courses and to supplement traditional face-to-face courses.

The name Moodle is an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.

Moodle was created by Martin Dougiamas, a computer scientist and educator who spent time supporting a CMS at a university in Perth, Australia.

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What Is a Course Management System?

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CMS are web applications, meaning that they run on a server and are accessed by using a web browser.

Your Moodle server is probably located in your university or department,but it can be anywhere in the world.

You and your students can access the system from any place with an Internet connection.

At their most basic, CMSs give educators tools to create a course web site and provide access control so only enrolled students can view it.

CMS also offer a wide variety of tools that can make your course more effective. They provide an easy way to upload and share materials, hold online discussions and chats, give quizzes and surveys, gather and review assignments, and record grades.

What Is a Course Management System?

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Let’s take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

•Uploading and sharing materialsMost CMS provide tools to easily publish content. Instead of using an HTMLeditor and then sending your documents to a server via FTP, you simply use a web form to store your syllabus on the server. Many instructors upload their syllabus, lecture notes, reading assignments, and articles for students to access whenever they want.

What Is a Course Management System?

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Let’s take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

•Forums and chatsOnline forums and chats provide a means of communication outside of classroom meetings. Forums give your students more time to generate their responses and can lead to more thoughtful discussions. Chats, on the other hand, give you a way to quickly and easily communicate with remote students. They can be used for project discussions between groups of students or for last-minute questions the day before an exam.

What Is a Course Management System?

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Let’s take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

•QuizzesOnline quizzes can be graded immediately. They are a great tool for givingstudents rapid feedback on their performance. Many publishers now provide banks of test questions tied to book chapters. A professor teaching a marketing class at San Francisco State uses weekly mini-tests to keep students engaged with the lectures and reading. He then uses proctored online testing to give the final exam using the same question banks.

What Is a Course Management System?

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Let’s take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

•Gathering and reviewing assignmentsOnline assignment submissions are an easy way to track and grade student assignments. In addition to grading student assignments yourself.

What Is a Course Management System?

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Let’s take a quick look at each of these features and how they might be useful:

•Recording gradesAn online gradebook can give your students up-to-date information about theirperformances in your course. CMS gradebooks allow students to see only their own grades, never another student’s. You can also download the grades into Excel for advanced calculations.

While you could find or write programs to do all of these things on your own site, a CMS combines all of these features in one integrated package.

Over the past eight years, CMS systems have matured rapidly and are now considered critical software for many colleges and universities.

The CMS market is now a multimillion dollar market and is growing quickly.

Why Should You Use a CMS ?

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Student demandStudents are becoming more technically savvy, and they want to get many of their course materials from the Web.

Student schedulesWith rising tuition, many students are working more hours to make ends meetwhile they are in school. With a CMS, they can communicate with the instructoror their peers whenever their schedules permit. They can also take quizzesor read course material during their lunch breaks. Working students need flexible access to courses, and a CMS is a powerful way to give them what they need (any time any where).

Better courses

If used well, CMSs can make your classes more effective and efficient.

What Makes Moodle Special?

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Free and Open Source

Educational PhilosophyMartin’s background in education led him to adopt social constructionism as a core theory behind Moodle. This is revolutionary, as most CMS systems have been built around tool sets, not pedagogy. Most commercial CMS systems are tool-centered, whereas Moodle is learning-centered.Social constructionism is based on the idea that people learn best when they are engaged in a social process. The term “social process” indicates that learning is something we do in groups.

Community

Moodle has a very large, active community of people who are using the system and developing new features and enhancements.