Learning Management System – Moodle
What is a Learning Management System? It’s an app that can help with learning and development, training programs, induction and much more. The system emerged from e-Learning and at the beginning was used in the education sector. Now, companies are using this type of software for employee training or to help their clients.
The LMS that I had a good experience with, is Moodle. I saw it used in universities for students training and exams and in companies for work safety training, data gathering for psychological tests, induction, internal procedures exposure or other types of training. You can also check the official video presentation in this video.
Moodle is a complex system with options almost for everything, one blog post it’s not enough to talk about all the features. I will try to underline what I think are it’s main strong points.
The documentations is detailed and you can find all the info you need. The forum is also a good place to look for info.
Probably the best feature of Moodle is that it’s open-source and free forever, as they state it. Can be used in self-hosted corporate environment at no charge. The only cost is the hosting server and/or third party support if you choose it. There is also a cloud option from Moodle but the storage plans seem a little low for today requirements if you want to include you own media.
The app is customizable, you can add your own logo and choose from a variety of themes and plugins from the Moodle directory depending on your needs. Each theme has it’s own customizations being able to modify colors, footer, main page, etc.
On courses you can add one of the default options bellow. Other options can be added via plugins. Personal media like photos, audio & video files, presentations, documents, etc. can be a part inside a course.
The last 2 features that are important for me are the mobile app, that you can use to connect to your own server, and login integrations with Google, Microsoft, meaning that if you have an cloud email based on these two services you can use the login credentials to access the app.
Overall Moodle is one of the greatest apps ever made, on a future post I will try to present also the course area with it’s main options. You can find a demo here.