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Product Name Moodle 1.8
Developer Name Moodle
URL www.moodle.org
Review Date April 19, 2007
Forums Moodle 1.8 Discussions
Reviewer Email Review Staff
Communication Tools
Discussion Forum
  • Students can enable or disable posts to be sent to their email.
  • Students can receive posts by email as daily digests of subject lines or whole posts.
  • Students can subscribe to forum RSS feeds.
  • A spell-checker is available for student and instructor responses.
Reviewer Comments
Granular roles system enables students to be set as administrator of individual forums in a course.


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Discussion Management
  • Instructors can allow students to create discussion groups.
  • Posts may be peer reviewed by other students.
  • Instructors can view statistical summaries of discussions displaying participation which can be used to generate grades.
  • Discussions can be shared across courses, departments, or any institutional unit.
Reviewer Comments
The Q & A forum requires students to post their perspectives before viewing other students' postings. After the initial posting, students can view and respond to others' postings. This feature allows equal initial posting opportunity among all students, thus encouraging original and independent thinking.


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File Exchange
  • Students can submit assignments using drop boxes.
Reviewer Comments
Students can upload files to their blog and share them with other users via the blog.


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Internal Email
  • Students can use the built-in email functionality to email individuals or groups.
  • Students can use a searchable address book.
  • Instructors can email the entire class at once at a single address or alias.
  • Students can elect to forward their mail to an external address.
Reviewer Comments
The Moodle messaging system can deliver mail either online or via email.


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Online Journal/Notes

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Real-time Chat
  • The chat tool supports unlimited simultaneous group discussions
  • Students can create new rooms.
  • The system creates archive logs for all chat rooms.


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Whiteboard Reviewer Comments
There are several optional add-ons with whiteboard capabilities such as Elluminate and DimDim.


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Productivity Tools
Bookmarks

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Calendar/Progress Review
  • Instructors and students can post events in the online course calendar.
  • Instructors can post announcements to a course announcement page.
  • Students have a personal home page that lists all courses in which the student is enrolled, new email and all course and system-wide events from their personal calendar.
  • Students can view their grades on completed assignments, total points possible, course grade, and compare their grades against the class performance.
  • Students can subscribe to RSS feeds to be notified of changes to materials.


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Searching Within Course
  • Students can search all discussion threads.


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Work Offline/Synchronize

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Orientation/Help
  • Students can access context sensitive help for any tool.
  • The system includes online tutorials for students that help students learn how to use the system.


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Student Involvement Tools
Groupwork
  • Instructors can assign students to groups.
  • Each group can have its own discussion forum.
  • Each group can have its own chat or whiteboard.


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Community Networking
  • Students from different courses can interact in system-wide chat rooms or discussion forums.


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Student Portfolios
  • Students can create a personal home page in each course.
Reviewer Comments
Students have a home page where their blog and personal calendar can be displayed. Custom blocks can be created to show other information.


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Administration Tools
Authentication
  • Administrators can allow guest access to all courses.
  • The system can authenticate against an external LDAP server.
  • The system can authenticate using the Kerberos protocol.
  • The system supports Shibboleth.
  • The system supports the Central Authentication Service (CAS).
  • The system can authenticate against IMAP, POP3 or secure NNTP.
  • The system can support multiple organizational units and virtual hosts within a server configuration.
Reviewer Comments
Different users can have different authentication settings. The Moodle Network enables different servers to join in trust relationships to provide single sign-on between Moodle sites.


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Course Authorization
  • The system supports restricting access based on roles and roles can also be customizedby the service provider.
  • Administrators can create an unlimited number of custom organizational units and roles with specific access privileges to course content and tools.
  • Administrators can distribute the permissions and roles across multiple institutions or departments hosted in the server environment.
  • Instructors or students may be assigned different roles in different courses.


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Registration Integration
  • Instructors can add students to their courses manually or allow students to self-register.
  • Administrators can batch add students to the system using a delimited text file.
  • Administrators can transfer student information bidirectionally between the system and an SIS using delimited text files.
  • Administrators can transfer student information bidirectionally between the system and an SIS using IMS Enterprise Specification v1.1 XML files via web services.
  • The software supports data interchange with student information systems through an event-driven API.
  • The software supports integration with SCT Banner, SCT Luminis, Datatel, PeopleSoft 8 or customized integration with other SIS or portal systems.
  • The software is compliant with the IMS Enterprise Specification for Student Data.


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Hosted Services
  • Hosting and support services from Commercial Affiliates.


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Course Delivery Tools
Test Types
  • Multiple choice
  • Multiple answer
  • Matching
  • Ordering
  • Jumbled sentence
  • Calculated
  • Fill-in the blank
  • Short answer
  • Essay
  • Questions can contain other media elements (images, videos, audio)
  • Custom question types can be defined.


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Automated Testing Management
  • The system can randomize the questions and answers.
  • Instructors can create self-assessments.
  • Instructors can set a time limit on a test.
  • Instructors can permit multiple attempts.
  • The students are allowed to review past attempts of a quiz.
  • Instructors can specify whether correct results are shown as feedback
  • The system supports Remote Quiz Protocol which allows questions to be rendered and scored externally to the system via standards-based web services.
Reviewer Comments
The system supports latex rendering of mathematical equations.


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Automated Testing Support
  • Instructors can create personal test banks.
  • Instructors can create system wide test banks.
  • The system provides test analysis data.
Reviewer Comments
There are a wide range of supported question types for import, and new question importers are easy to write.


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Online Marking Tools
  • Instructors can choose to mark each student on all questions or to mark each question on all students.


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Online Gradebook
  • When an instructor adds an assignment to the course, the software automatically adds it to the gradebook.
  • Instructors can add grades for offline assignments.
  • Instructors can export the scores in the gradebook to an external spreadsheet.
  • Instructors can create a course grading scale that can employ either percents, letter grades, or pass/fail metrics.
Reviewer Comments
Instructors can add detailed comments to manually graded items in the Assignment module, Lesson module, and Quiz module.


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Course Management

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Student Tracking
  • Instructors can track the frequency and duration of student access to individual course components.
  • Instructors can get reports showing the number of times, time, date, frequency and IP address of each student who accessed course content, discussion forums, course assessments, and assignments.
  • Instructors can review the navigation record of each student.
  • Usage statistics can be aggregated across courses or across the institution.


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Content Development Tools
Accessibility Compliance
  • The product provider self-reports that the software complies with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act.
  • The product provider self-reports that the software complies with the WAI WCAG 1.0 Level A guidelines.
  • The product provider self-reports that the software complies with the WAI WCAG 1.0 AA guidelines.
  • The product provider self-reports that the software complies with the WAI WCAG 1.0 AAA guidelines.


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Content Sharing/Reuse Reviewer Comments
Instructors can make complete copies of entire courses and/or individual items in courses, and share them with other instructors or load them into one of the eCMS systems with a Moodle integration (Hive, Odalis, etc.)


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Course Templates
  • The software provides support for template-based course creation.
  • Course content may be uploaded through WebDAV.
  • The system allows administrators to use an existing course or a pre-defined template as a basis for a new course.


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Customized Look and Feel
  • The system provides default course look and feel templates.
  • Instructors can change the navigation icons and color schemes for a course.
  • Instructors can change the order and name of menu items for a course.
  • Institutions can create their own look and feel templates across the entire system, including their own institutional logos, headers, and footers.
  • The system can support multiple institutions, departments, schools or other organizational units on a single installation where each unit can apply its own look and feel templates as well as institutional images, headers and footers.


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Instructional Design Tools
  • Instructors can organize learning objects, course tools, and content into learning sequences that are reusable.
  • Instructors can create linear learning sequences organized hierarchically by course, lesson, and topic.
  • Instructors can reuse courses as templates for future lessons.


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Instructional Standards Compliance
  • AICC
  • IMS Content Packaging 1.1.3
  • IMS Content Packaging 1.1.4
  • IMS Enterprise 1.1
  • SCORM 1.2


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Hardware/Software
Client Browser Required Reviewer Comments
All major web browsers work fine.


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Database Requirements
  • The system supports Oracle.
  • The system supports MS SQL Server.
  • The system supports MySQL.
  • The system supports PostGreSQL.
  • The application requires only one database and can coexist with tables from other applications.


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UNIX Server
  • A Unix version is available.


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Windows Server
  • A Windows version is available.


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Company Details/Licensing
Company Profile

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Costs / Licensing

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Open Source
  • The software is distributed under one of the OSI-approved licenses.


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Optional Extras Reviewer Comments
The M stands for Modular, new teaching and learning tools can be created and freely shared by using the modular API to extend the program's capabilities.


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Reference Citation: EduTools. (2010). CMS: Product Comparison System. Retrieved September 08, 2010 from http://www.edutools.org/compare.jsp?pj=4&i=592