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Product Name Moodle 1.9
Developer Name Moodle
URL http://moodle.org
Review Date August 29, 2008
Forums Moodle 1.9 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
There are many other features and configurations of forums than are listed here.


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Discussion Management
  • Instructors can allow students to create discussion groups.
  • Instructors can set up moderated discussions where all posts are screened.
  • 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.


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File Exchange
  • Students can submit assignments using drop boxes.


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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.
  • Students can elect to forward their mail to an external address.


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Online Journal/Notes

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Real-time Chat
  • The chat tool supports a limited number of simultaneous rooms.
  • The chat tool supports unlimited simultaneous group discussions
  • Students can create new rooms.
  • Instructors may moderate chats and suspend students from the chat rooms.
  • The system creates archive logs for all chat rooms.


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Whiteboard Reviewer Comments
It can supported by adding available 3rd party modules for Dim Dim, Elluminate or other products.


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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.
  • Students can search chat or virtual classroom session recordings.


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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.
  • The system can randomly create groups of a certain size or a set number of groups.
  • Students can self-select groups.
  • Each group can have its own discussion forum.
  • Each group can have its own chat or whiteboard.
  • Each group can be given group-specific assignments or activities.
  • Groups may be private or instructors can monitor groups.


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Community Networking
  • Students can create online clubs, interest, and study groups at the system level.
  • Students from different courses can interact in system-wide chat rooms or discussion forums.


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Student Portfolios

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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.
  • Administrators can set up fail-through authentication against a secondary source (e.g. the system's own database) in the event that the primary source (e.g. LDAP server ) fails.
  • The system can support multiple organizational units and virtual hosts within a server configuration.


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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.
Reviewer Comments
Moodle itself is FREE to use, but optional hosting services are provided by Moodle Partners.


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Course Delivery Tools
Test Types
  • Multiple choice
  • Multiple answer
  • Matching
  • Ordering
  • Jumbled sentence
  • Calculated
  • Fill-in the blank
  • Short answer
  • Survey questions
  • 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.
  • The system supports a MathML editor for the inclusion of mathematical formulas in both questions and answers.
  • Instructors can specify whether correct results are shown as feedback
  • The system supports proctored tests.
  • The system supports Remote Quiz Protocol which allows questions to be rendered and scored externally to the system via standards-based web services.


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Automated Testing Support
  • Instructors can create personal test banks.
  • Instructors can create system wide test banks.
  • Questions can be imported from external test banks that support QTI.
  • The system provides test analysis data.


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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.
  • Instructors can choose to evaluate student responses anonymously.
  • Instructors can enable students to rate and comment on submissions of other 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 add details to the gradebook in custom columns.
  • 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.


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Course Management
  • Instructors can selectively release assignments, assessments, and announcements based on specific start and stop dates.
  • Instructors can personalize access to specific course materials based on group membership.


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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 time and date and frequency students as an aggregated group accessed course content.
  • 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.


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Content Sharing/Reuse
  • Instructors can share content with other instructors and students through a central learning objects repository.
  • The repository can be system-wide or for individual organizational units.


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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 QTI 1.2.1
  • IMS Enterprise 1.1
  • SCORM 1.2
  • SCORM 1.3


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Hardware/Software
Client Browser Required

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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 Reviewer Comments
Moodle Pty Ltd is the company that organises funding and pays for core development, support plus quality assurance, allowing a broad community to help work on any aspect they want to.


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Costs / Licensing Reviewer Comments
Moodle is free and distributed under the GPL license.


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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
Moodle has a wide range of third-party modules that can extend functionality in different ways.


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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=616