The beauties of Moodle

The beauties of Moodle

Moodle is an open source course management system that is used to add wed technology to learning and supplement traditional (face-to-face) learning environment. Moodle means Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. It was developed in PHP and MySQL; and provides a lot of functions for organizations and individuals to deliver online courses.

With Moodle, one can design a customizable homepage and use its numerous functions to build a lot of learning activities around and organize them into “Courses”.  For a trainee/participant to access Moodle and enroll for relevant courses, he/she must login into Moodle. Moodle is highly customizable to meet the needs of different organizations and users using “blocks”. The “blocks” can be used to customize the homepage and course pages.  To a meaningful extent a user’s view of the homepage can be personalized to their access rights or the group they belong. For example, a trainee can only see and view the calendar event entries and events   relevant to their courses, while the system administrator can see and view all the courses and calendar events.

There are many beauties of Moodle, presented below are some

1. Free and ease of use: Moodle is open source software; thus it is free in essence. It has a beautiful graphic user interface that can be customized using different themes. This make Moodle easy to use from the perspective of the learner/trainee, teacher/educator and system administer.
2. Designed with learning in mind: Moodle is designed with learning in mind. Most of its functions with the teachers and learner in mind to aid discussions, share of knowledge and testing knowledge. Some of the functions are forums, Assignment, questionnaires, files and web pages and wikis.
3. Rich features – Resources and Activities: Moodle is very rich in features for providing resources in courses and to engage the learners in activities.  A course can be designed to include resources (like files, web pages and links), activities (like assignment, quizzes and questionnaire (both choices and survey), forum, chatting, messaging and Wiki or SCORM content. It provided an environment for trainers to mark assignments by viewing or downloading and record the result. This also monitors the time of submission of the assignments; it can block and control access. Enrollment keys can be assigned to courses to filter to restrict access to courses or assign learners to groups. Moodle provides an easy means to connect or link learners with other rich contents is other websites without leaving Moodle.
4. Adaptable to different pedagogies: Due to the above mentioned features of Moodle: ease of use, designed with learning in mind and rich features have made Moodle adaptable to the following pedagogy: constructivism, social constructivism and connectivism. This means that knowledge can be acquired, shared and developed through interaction and collaboration Moodle.
5. Active Learning: Moodle is learner centered and used as an e-learning technology. it give learners the opportunity to learn independently and interdependently by studying online in the web. Based on constructivism, learners can learn to assimilate and process knowledge/information, by social constructivism learn by collaborating with one another through forums, wikis and groups; and through reinforcement of continuous assimilating knowledge and collaborating with others learners are able to connect to the knowledge (Connectivism).
6. FeedBack: Moodle provides instant feedback for tests, quizzes assignment and projects to learners. A good Moodle course will specify how students will be assessed and graded. Trainers/teachers and trainee/learners can write and read their comments and engage in chatting and forum in real time.
7. Multi–functional and Integrated: From all the above, it is clear that Moodle has a lot of functions and rich features. There are designed to be modular, each module can be setup to be as standalone or it can be integrated to complement. For example, text files, audios files and video files can be used to complement resources like web pages and text. This makes it possible to use Moodle to build a news website, collaboration website and even a school portal. In fact you can do with Moodle is limited by your imagination.

Finally, the modules of Moodle are interactive and designed to engage learners and teachers to participate interact and collaborate with each other. Thus Moodle can be used for both Synchronous and Asynchronous learning. Features and functions like chatting, forums and wiki are designed to aid self-initiative, active participation, interdependent studies and collaboration.

Thank you very much.

Augustus Zekaryah

Presented below is a list of other articles in this website that might be of interest to you.

1. What is e-learning?
2. Learning and e-learning
3. Types of e-learning
4. E-learning technologies
5. Benefits of e-learning
6. Limitations of e-learning

Please drop your comments as you read them because your feedback is very important to us. It will help us to improve.

We also encourage you to permit us to include you in our mailing list, by clicking the mailing list check point

Regards

Augustus Zekaryah