Moodle, The Learning Management System

[k_nitin_r 8]

Moodle is an learning management system. You can use it to organize the material that you hand out to a class, to deliver quizzes, and to keep track of grades. Moodle also provides community features for students to discuss in forums.Moodle is a web based system written in PHP. If you would like to install Moodle on a web hosting service, you have to make sure that your web hosting service supports the minimum requirements of the version you are installing. This includes the PHP version of the hosting environment, PHP extensions, and the MySQL database version.Moodle 2.4 requires PHP 5.3.2 and MySQL 5.1.33, as of this writing, is the current version of Moodle. Moodle 2.3.3 has the same requirements of Moodle 2.4. Moodle 2.2.6 can run with MySQL 5.0.25, but also has the requirement of PHP 5.3.2. Moodle 2.1.9 has the same requirements as Moodle 2.2.6. If you are running on a web hosting service that does not meet the minimum requirements for PHP, you can install Moodle 1.9.19, which requires PHP 4.3.0 and MySQL 4.1.16. You can install an unsupported version of Moodle as well, if you want more features but don't have the system requirements to support one of the above-mentioned versions, but you would not get any security updates if any loop holes in the system are discovered. Right now, the free web hosting uses PHP version 5.2.17 so you can either install Moodle 1.9 or the unsupported Moodle 2.0.10. Some tweaks may be needed to deal with any additional requirements of PHP 5.2 (does it need the time zone to be set?) or deprecated features.It is, however, possible to modify Moodle to run on PHP 5.2 by back-porting the parts of Moodle that use the new PHP 5.3 features. It takes a bit of development effort and you would have to back-port any updates made to the version you are forking off as well. With the open-source methodology, you can even re-distribute your fork of Moodle and possibly seek to make a profit by providing your consulting services.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

You really should link to the site here as well, since it's definitely on topic.I didn't realize Moodle had grades though -- interesting. I was looking into the system a long time ago but never really got into it, so I'm guessing it's evolved a lot.I can actually use it for a new project I'm working on though! Time to go back into research on it, .

[k_nitin_r 8]

Moodle can actually give you a whole report on all of the student activities for the course. It even goes as far as telling you what the students were thinking when they answered a question... did they click on one radio button and then change their minds and click on another radio button? Did they finish early? A downside is that if the students do not finish on time, they get a zero on the quiz and there doesn't seem to be any way to get Moodle to grade them on the answers that they did mark.BTW, the quiz engine in Moodle is the feature that most people use it for - it has an import/export system, it supports options with partial credit, it supports calculated results where you can get Moodle to randomly select values within a range, and it can compute the correct answer so you do not have to manually grade the results. Moodle can also grade answers in which students have to type in their answers by looking for specific keywords. Sure, it may be inaccurate but when you have to grade the work of a hundred students, it beats having to visit each and every one of them - and you can re-visit the answers if you have the time or if the students call for a grade appeal. I'm not sure if Moodle supports grade appeals though. I'm guessing it is a manual adjustment that you have to do on paper... or within Excel after exporting the grades. If Moodle's grading is an all-or-nothing, it would have a lot of instructors overloaded with manual grade corrections at the end of a course.

[rpgsearcherz 5]

Moodle can actually give you a whole report on all of the student activities for the course. It even goes as far as telling you what the students were thinking when they answered a question... did they click on one radio button and then change their minds and click on another radio button? Did they finish early? A downside is that if the students do not finish on time, they get a zero on the quiz and there doesn't seem to be any way to get Moodle to grade them on the answers that they did mark.
BTW, the quiz engine in Moodle is the feature that most people use it for - it has an import/export system, it supports options with partial credit, it supports calculated results where you can get Moodle to randomly select values within a range, and it can compute the correct answer so you do not have to manually grade the results. Moodle can also grade answers in which students have to type in their answers by looking for specific keywords. Sure, it may be inaccurate but when you have to grade the work of a hundred students, it beats having to visit each and every one of them - and you can re-visit the answers if you have the time or if the students call for a grade appeal. I'm not sure if Moodle supports grade appeals though. I'm guessing it is a manual adjustment that you have to do on paper... or within Excel after exporting the grades. If Moodle's grading is an all-or-nothing, it would have a lot of instructors overloaded with manual grade corrections at the end of a course.

Being that it's open-source, I think any small things (like changing grades), if it's not already supported, should be pretty easy to implement. Sadly I suck with API's so I'd be doing that with an external script.

I did a lot of research into Moodle and a major concern I have is how inefficient it is. It looks like any major site that uses the system does heavy altering of its core to make it work better. The default Moodle installation, for example, has (I think it was 36) a lot of queries.

Don't get me wrong, I think the concept is awesome. But if I make the move, it will be a long-term choice. Factoring in expansion is a major part of that, and it makes me wonder if I'd be better off writing a custom script rather than trying to learn/alter theirs, especially since I wouldn't be using some of their features anyways, and if there's things I need I'd have to write a lot of new stuff.