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Course Platform Evaluation Report

Products

Moodle 1.5.2

Martin Dougiamas and open-source community: http://www.moodle.org
Martin Dougiamas is the originator, lead developer, project manager and release manager of Moodle, present on moodle.org since 2002. Moodle.com was launched in 2003 to offer commercial service by Moodle Partners (Swiss Moodle Partner: mediagonal AG, Fribourg).
Last major evaluation update: August 2005

About product
Available since 2002, Moodle is provided freely under the GNU Public License. It was developed based on a pedagogical philosophy (social constructivist). Moodle can be installed on any web server with a php interpreter and fully supports using mySQL or postgreSQL databases.

About producer
Martin Dougiamas is the originator, lead developer, project manager and release manager of Moodle, present on moodle.org since 2002. Moodle.com was launched in 2003 to offer commercial service by Moodle Partners (Swiss Moodle Partner: mediagonal AG, Fribourg).

Strengths
Moodle has a pleasant interface, making it easy to understand and get started quickly. One can set up a simple course (content pages, forum, quizzes) relatively quickly, yet Moodle offers other more advanced activities as well (such as Wiki, Assignments, Glossary, Survey, Lesson, etc.). Even with these additional options, the interface remains clean, uncluttered and pleasant to use. The Moodle user community is quite active, as seen in the forums on moodle.org.

Weaknesses
The documentation (Teacher's Manual) gets you started with simple features quickly, but some more advanced features are not quite as well documented and may require a search at moodle.org forums to find information.