At the time of writing, there are over 160 thousand registered Moodle websites, and as you’ve landed on this page, you’re likely considering adding one more to this tally.
Before you start, though, it’s a good idea to learn more about Moodle and see how it can help you build your project. You’ve come to the right place.
Today, we’ll take a closer look at Moodle and see why it has become the world’s most popular open-source learning management system (LMS) platform. We’ll show you what makes it stand out from the crowd and give you tips for making the most of its features. Last but not least, we’ll guide you to resources that will help you familiarize yourself with Moodle and build your project more quickly and efficiently.
Let’s get to it.
Chapter 1
Getting to Know Moodle
Most likely, you first want to learn whether Moodle is easy to use. A simple Google search reveals that you’re not the first person asking the question, with even more people trying to answer it. The responses are pretty varied.
Some say that Moodle is designed with programmers in mind, while others claim even complete novices can easily run projects based on the LMS. The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle.
Running a Moodle website doesn’t require any coding skills. The LMS has a backend dashboard with a point-and-click interface and all the necessary tools to manage your courses. Furthermore, most hosting accounts are equipped with utilities that automatically install Moodle and get you started in minutes – no searching for commands, copying files, and editing databases.
If this is your first Moodle site, it’s best to invest the time you’ve saved with the automatic installer into familiarizing yourself with the platform. Clicking through the menus and buttons in your site’s backend is not enough – you should also try to learn more about what Moodle does, how it works, and what you need to do to keep your website in perfect working order.
You can start by going through the links below.
- What is Moodle?
- How to Install Moodle on Hosting Server?
- Latest Features and Updates in Moodle 4
- How to Update Moodle
- What Are the Best Examples of Moodle Implementation?
- The Limitations of The Moodle Framework
- A Guide to Moodle Security
Chapter 2
Hosting Moodle
The success of your elearning project depends to a large extent on ensuring that the courses are easily accessible from anywhere at any time. This means finding a suitable hosting service for them.
Moodle is written in PHP, it supports the most popular web servers and database management systems. It works well under both Windows and Linux, and in light of all this, you may think that finding a suitable hosting account for your project would be easy.
This is not strictly the case.
Modern online courses have a lot of multimedia in them. Thanks to it, they’re more interactive and easier to digest. This also means that their storage requirements are usually fairly steep. You have to ensure the hosting account you choose meets them.
Processing power and memory are just as important. Thanks to plugins, you can expand Moodle’s functionality and add all sorts of features that are not enabled by default. All these add-ons consume hardware resources, though, and you must ensure your hosting account can provide them.
This is actually more important than you think. All websites need to load quickly, but perhaps none more so than the ones acting as online educational platforms. To guarantee the success of your courses, you must ensure students pay attention as much of the time as possible – not an easy task if your site takes ages to load.
In addition to the performance, the type and configuration of the hosting service also affect your site’s security posture, highlighting yet again how important it is to find the best plan.
The links below contain a few hints that will help you do it.
- How to Choose the Right Moodle Hosting
- Moodle on Shared Hosting and Why You Need a VPS
- What Are the Benefits of Hosting Moodle on ScalaHosting?
- How to Host Moodle on AWS with ScalaHosting
- Possible Hosting Issues With Moodle
Chapter 3
Building a Moodle Website
Moodle is more popular than you may think. It’s used by over 360 million users in more than 240 countries worldwide – formidable figures made all the more impressive by the fact that it’s far from the only application of its kind.
Many elearning services exploded in 2020 when lockdown restrictions forced millions to move online, but none of these solutions reached Moodle’s popularity.
Why?
Well, Moodle’s age has a bit to do with it. First released in August 2002, the LMS has played a significant role in forming the concept of online education as we know it. Tutors and students the world over are familiar with it, and they’re happy with the results it produces. You can hardly blame them for refusing to look elsewhere.
However, Moodle wouldn’t be so popular if it wasn’t versatile. It has not only enabled schools and universities to implement online education into their programs; it has also kickstarted countless projects by corporations, government organizations, non-profits, etc.
Chances are, it fits your project’s needs, as well, or if it doesn’t, you can most likely enable the required functionality with a plugin. Then, it’s a matter of creating your courses and building the project around them.
The links below will show you how to do it.
- How to Create a Course in Moodle: A Comprehensive Guide + Tips
- How to Create a Quiz in Moodle
- How to Create a Virtual Classroom with Moodle
- 5 Best Free Virtual Classroom Plugins for Moodle
- How Can I Utilize Moodle for Corporate Training?
- Creative Ways to Utilize Moodle for Non-Academic Purposes and Training
- How to Sell Courses in Moodle?
- Moodle for Remote and Hybrid Learning – Common Challenges and Solutions
- How To Apply Activity Restrictions in Moodle
Chapter 4
Moodle vs. Other LMS Solutions
In the past, Moodle’s competition came mostly in the form of other open-source learning management systems. More recently, quite a few solutions using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model have emerged.
The choice is wider than ever, and users want to know how the alternatives stack up. There is no single answer, of course, but if we have to summarize, we’d probably say that trying to keep up with Moodle will always be a challenge.
The name “Moodle” is an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, and the word we’re interested in here is “modular.”
Modular architecture means using a relatively simple plugin to enable a feature or functionality that would otherwise take months to implement. Adapting Moodle to the latest trends in the elearning world is much easier, and because it’s built on a codebase maintained and developed by a large community of programmers and fans, bugs are fixed fairly quickly, as well.
The learning management system’s competitors are trying their best to offset these advantages, and although they succeed in some aspects, Moodle is still holding its own in others.
The head-to-head comparisons below should help you determine whether it’s the best choice for your project.
