Comments on: Training the Web Worker Way: Moodle

By: Matt Apple

Matt Apple — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:56:36 +0000

I’m a programmer for a fairly large community college (14,000 students this semester). We’ve been using Moodle for about a year and a half. I work with Moodle all day long(current version 1.9.7), mostly problemshooting, designing and running reports straight out of the database (that the Moodle interface doesn’t let you do) and interfacing Moodle with other systems. All in all we have a love/hate relationship with Moodle. It is for the most part functional and our students and teachers can mostly get along in Moodle. But we are frequently confronted by undocumented Moodle weirdness and it sometimes has a “not ready for primetime” quality to it. During my manic phases it sometimes inspires me to write a Moodle-clone that solves all the issues that I have with Moodle. But then I quickly come to my senses. I still like it better than Blackboard, which is what it replaced here at our school.

But since its free don’t take anyone’s word for it, download it onto your machine, set it up(its easy) and then play with it for a while.

By: Alison Cross

Alison Cross — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 08:53:35 +0000

I have built a small website for a friend who wants to run 3 on-line creative writing courses, each with a maximum of 8 students.

She uses moodle at university and loves it, but I think that she should try out other completely free options to see how successful (or not) the courses will be.

Reading all the comments has confirmed my thoughts that there are other, entirely free ways that she could run these modules.

Thank you very much, guys (and guyettes!) :-)

By: JHG

JHG — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:35:47 +0000

That’s really interesting, was not aware this was existing and top as freeware. Good stuff.

By: Webmaster Forum

Webmaster Forum — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:02:15 +0000

I do agree with you that moodle is a great cms and i had seen alot of sites using them.

By: WebWorkerDaily » Archive Moodle: a Flexible, Open Source Online Learning Platform «

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 23:01:00 +0000

[...] Bob Walsh noted here a while back, Moodle is particularly flexible as a training tool, and has been used to [...]

By: Hari

Hari — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:19:54 +0000

I tried NineHub.com provides free Moodle hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwidth. Good enough!

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:18:34 +0000

If you want to create and launch an online course in minutes, please check out eLearningZoom.com and start your FREE Trial.

http://www.eLearningZoom.com

By: indre

indre — Sun, 25 May 2008 01:35:39 +0000

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By: PKayne

PKayne — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:07:07 +0000

Are you serious MoodleMan? That example (because one worked) are horrendous, straight out of 1995 web design school. Moodle is ugly as the day is long. And as a modern day User interface designer (not the 1970 hacks that are ripping off people for mediocre web design) it’s a down right nightmare of a technical system to properly design for. CSS Zen gone horribly wrong.

From the interface development side, its major drawback is the poor style coding within the html. The HTML is supposed to be the cake and CSS the icing. Well this cake had icing, nuts, screws, nails all in it. 90% of divs had a minimum of four classes and 1 id tag. And every other tag had inline styles in the HTML! You can’t adjust that. Some inputs had styles some didn’t. Absolute chaos.

Any non-table neanderthal could see that the developers working on Moodle’s front-end coding are just plain confused, because the thing is so freaking adhoc. The result is that it definitely limits creating an interface that is not only aesthetically appealing but aesthetically functional. Inclusion of features that augment the user experience and enhance ease of use are truly difficult.

But thank god it’s not impossible to surmount this garbage mountain. I did it, so look out for finally a good design using Moodle in the next few months. Moodle needs to realise that not only content is important but the way how you present the content makes it accessible.

By: MoodleMan (Julian Ridden)

MoodleMan (Julian Ridden) — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:44:46 +0000

Moodle does not have to be ugly. Check out http://playpen.riverview.nsw.edu.au or http://ignition.riverview.nsw.edu.au for two examples that are not.

I have been a keen advocate of Moodle for some years now. It is customizable, extendable and one of the more intuitive systems I have come across. I would certainly say it is an Enterprise level product (Open University UK use it with tens of thousands of users) while having a zero cost point to purchase.

While not without it’s flaws, I do think it is one of the better systems out there. Check out my blog for more details on what you can do when you invest some time with Moodle