Moodle is an alternative to proprietary commercial online learning solutions and is distributed free under open source licensing.  An organization has complete access to the source code and can make changes if needed. Moodle’s modular design makes it easy to create new courses, adding content that will engage learners. Moodle is an acronym for Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.

Features:-

  • Promotes a social constructionist pedagogy (collaboration, activities, critical reflection, etc)
  • Suitable for 100% online classes as well as supplementing face-to-face learning
  • Simple, lightweight, efficient, compatible, low-tech browser interface
  • Easy to install on almost any platform that supports PHP. Requires only one database (and can share it).
  • Full database abstraction supports all major brands of database (except for initial table definition)
  • Course listing shows descriptions for every course on the server, including accessibility to guests.
  • Courses can be categorised and searched – one Moodle site can support thousands of courses
  • Emphasis on strong security throughout. Forms are all checked, data validated, cookies encrypted etc
  • Most text entry areas (resources, forum postings etc) can be edited using an embedded WYSIWYG HTML editor.

A case study of implementation at Inmantec Institutions(Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh India). Same can be accessed from here. For more information on moodle please visit http://moodle.org. There are several books written on moodle and same can be accessed from here.