Technology Metro

Moodle is a course management system that is open source. It uses pedagogical principals, a working theory that states the belief that as people interact with their surroundings they develop knowledge using their senses and that new knowledge becomes embedded as they use it. This downloadable, open source software can be used by one person or a learning institution with as many as two hundred thousand students.

The community that uses Moodle encompasses nearly 200 countries speaking over seventy languages. This system is very flexible, letting the user customize it as it best suits them and is supported by programmers all over the world. There are many advantages to this software package, including the ability to provide feedback to each individual assignment. It also makes it simple to track a student’s progress and activity in class. Distance learning is customized using nearly two hundred teacher-created modules that instructors can customize to their own method of teaching. Instructors like the fact that they have access to resources provided by the actual users of Moodle.

Moodle periodically provides updates with new features, the latest being Gradebook. Another new development is support for Tagging, a feature that links courses and users to sites such as Youtube by using tags.

Surveys show that when they compare teaching software, students give strong support to Moodle. They say that Moodle helps them improve their skills in solving problems, interacting with other students and facilitates communication with instructors. Students also prefer Moodle’s technical assistance. Moodle is user friendly and has tools that other software doesn’t, such as polls and glossaries. Another survey shows that nearly sixty percent of students using Moodle would like it used in other courses, where less than fifty percent would want a course using other software.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Internet, Open Source, Software.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.