Moodle is so far theOpen Source best Learning management system, For those who dont know what moodle is: Moodle is a Learning Platform or course management system (CMS) – a free Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective online courses based on sound pedagogical principles.
There are a lot of Open Source Learning platforms (Chamilo, aTutor etc) but Moodle has been the most preferred due to its large community of developers and also support by various universities and humanitarian organizations like MSF and UNHCR. Some private companies have customizedMoodle and produced a better version of it but with a different name. Example is Totara Learn by Catalyst UK, It is based on Moodle with a layer customizations to fit corporate organizations.
So far, Moodle is the best but there are a lot of advancements in Learning and Development which are yet to be added to Moodle . some of these include:
- Chatbots – bots and AI is the future, many learning platforms are adopting this kind of interactions, some are even fully conversation based like filtered. There are quit less development in Moodle focused on this which makes it “boring”. Read on The First Moodle Chatbot, At Last. MoodleMoot Australia 2017
- Personalized learning – if you try some applications like Codecademy and Linkedln Learning, you will find it more interesting because they try to suggest courses to you based on your preferences. In Moodle, it is the opposite! It has a long static catalogue of courses. This is a weakness!!
- Modern UI – most web applications nowadays are trying to make it easy for user to navigate through without need of “special” training, we have seen a lot of changes in UI including the development of material design and complexion reduction. Moodle’s structure has never changed making it hard for users to easily navigate through it, Most learners will spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to use Moodle. It is Complex!!
- Dedicated servers – Moodle has been designer in a way that it doesn’t work well in shared hosting, it requires its own server with custom setup. This can be expensive for small scale deployments.
- Gamification – Everyone online is talking about this features!! most Learning systems have implemented it but others are over doing it. This can be annoying sometimes!!. ForMoodle, Gamification is not well structure, everyone is talking about it but you cannot easily implement this feature, It requires special development!!
- Experience API and Tin Can API – these two are trending in learning and development, everyone is speaking about it but there is no clear way of implementing it. I have been testing it on Moodle and i totally don’t see the big advantage of it. There are less success stories about Experience API and Tin Can API in Moodle
- SCORM – Yea Moodle and SCORM, I don’t want to comment about this but I hate SCORM Packages!!
There are so many other missing features but if you will to try other “amazing” Learning management systems, Try these:
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