Moodle
Description
Moodle is an online learning management system (LMS) designed to provide teachers, trainers and learners a secure and integrated system to create personalized yet collaborative learning environments. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software, which means that Moodle is continually being improved and new tools are developed. Moodle is available in 120 languages (and more translations are being made). The platform is scalable which means that it can support both small classes as well as large organisations.
Moodle provides many tools and features that support blended learning and online courses. The heart of Moodle is courses that contain activities (e.g. forums, glossaries, wikis, assignments, quizzes, polls and learning resources). The participant of each course constitute a learning community and collaborative tools can be used in order to enhance communication and peer-learning (e.g. forums, chat, blogs). It´s possible to add and remove learners from courses or to provide them a self-registration-code to the course.
Key functionality
- Compatibility: Accessible through computers & mobile devices
- User accounts: Users need to register to be able to use Moodle. Usually the user name and password is provided by the organisation who uses Moodle as learning platform.
- Personalised dashboard: Enables the user to organize and display courses the way the user wants. Makes it possible to view at a glance user´s current tasks and messages.
- Collaborative tools: These include wiki, forums, glossaries etc. Collaborative tools and activities make it possible to work and learn together in different ways.
- Activities: This is general name for a group of features in a Moodle course. An activity is something student will have to do and often it involves interaction with other students and/or the teacher. Activity means something students can contribute to directly. At the moment there are 14 different types of activities in the standard Moodle: Assignments, Chat, Choice, Database, Feedback, Forum, Glossary, Lesson, External tool, Quiz, SCORM, Survey, Wiki, Workshop.
- Resources: This is e.g. a file or internet-page presented to students by the teacher. Often a resource is connected to e.g. an assignment. The resource provided by the teacher is used as information source for completing the assignment.
- Calendar: Helps the user to keep track of course deadlines, group meetings and other events.
- File management: It enables the user to drag and drop files from cloud storage services e.g. MS One Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive.
- Notifications: Users can receive automatic alerts on new assignments and deadlines, forum posts.
- Private messages: It´s possible for teachers, students and other users to send and receive private messages via Moodle.
- Tracking progress: Trainers and learners can track progress and assignment completion at course level and use gradebook to document grades.
Who uses the tool
Users:
Students, teachers, administrators in primary schools, upper secondary schools (high schools and VET-schools), tertiary level education (universities). Also workplaces and other sectors.
Pedagogical purposes:
- Moodle is developed on pedagogical principles and used for blended learning, distance education, flipped classroom and other e-learning projects.
- Moodle is a good platform for evaluating students’ skills through tests and exams.
- It´s widely used worldwide in comprehensive schools, VET-schools, higher education institutions as well as workplaces and other sectors.
- Moodle is open-source learning management system (LMS), so all it´s features and functionalities are related to learning and pedagogics.
Platforms
- Moodle Mobile app works with Moodle sites that have been set up to allow it.
- Web: all modern browsers
Privacy and user data
The app collects the following types of information from all users:
- User information that is e.g. name, e-mail address, home organization.
- The user´s profile in the service
The app uses this information to:
- help users to efficiently access their information after they sign in (user authorization in Moodle)
- make it possible to contact users of Moodle
- track students´ activity and manage students´ learning and grading.
- diagnose or fix technology problems and investigate abuse of the service
- monitor the load and capacity of the server and the network.
Terms and conditions of use can be found on this page:
There is not a common terms and condition page, because privacy policy of Moodle is defined by the home organization (primary school, university etc.)
Using the tool for PROMOVET
Advantages
- Moodle is an integrated system for creating online learning environment, so the young learner can find everything regarding the course from one place.
- A good test platform
Disadvantages
- Moodle is usually provided by the VET-institution and therefore all assignments, learning resources etc. remain on the platform. After graduation the learner does not normally have access to Moodle-platform and -courses anymore.
