Learning Conversations

I’m a big fan of Moodle, and have been since it was first released. At the time, I was working as a consultant, going into schools and supporting their implementation of a particular “learning platform”. When Moodle was released it became increasingly difficult to highlight the benefits of the software I was advocating - when I knew there was a far better alternative...

Moodle offered many advantages to schools:

• Low cost of entry - it was easy and cheap to try it out
• Simple, consistent interface, with workflows built around the needs of the teacher
• Highly flexible course design, with the ability to mix and match many different types of resources (files of all types) and activities (where the student has to do something, eg. forums, wikis, quizzes etc)
• Well thought out philosophy of learning

Over time, Moodle’s foothold in the formal education sector has increased massively. Alongside that, many organisations in the corporate sector have begun to use it as the system of choice. The advantages for this sector are similar in many ways to schools and colleges:

• Tried and tested technology - with many examples of high volume Moodle sites
• No license fees - so easy to pilot and to scale up (not forgetting that scaling up will need significant investment in technology, integration services and support)
• Robust and secure software underpinned by rigorous development processes (of the core code)

However, very few corporate users of Moodle are making use of its most powerful features, which are designed to support tutors and teachers as they work with students.

Instead, they are using a very small subset of the available functionality, and trying to lever a system designed for formal, teacher-supported education into the self-service corporate learning & development environment. This raises some significant problems:

Content delivery

Most corporate L&D departments simply focus on delivering content (usually SCORM packages). This is a shame, because they’re missing out on some great tools, but it also means that users have to get to grips with the course interfaces, just to access content.

It starts with the course container, into which all resources and activities are placed. That’s fine if you want to build a “curriculum” or “course” with multiple things for the learner to access. But most organisations just want to deliver single SCORM packages. The best LMS’s make it really easy for learners to quickly get to where they need by providing links on their home page, or even automatically emailing deep links to them. That’s only possible with Moodle if you create some extra code to expose those links on the home page.

Student record system

Moodle is designed to work alongside a student record system which makes sure the right students have access to the right courses, with the right permissions and in the right groups.

If you don’t have access to such a system with that sort of data, then you’ll need to create one or build processes (eg. with Excel) that mirror its functionality. The alternative is to use the powerful self-service registration and enrolment functions built into Moodle, but that often means relinquishing some control, with an associated increase in risk.

Face-to-face events

There is a face-to-face events module that can be added to Moodle, but this is really designed to manage events within the course paradigm. There is no concept of the course being the event itself.

So, if you’re going to need some way of managing many events across different courses, along with joining instructions and trainers’ diaries, then you’ll need something else in addition to Moodle.

Site-wide reporting

Most of the reporting available within Moodle is designed to help teachers manage their individual courses. There is little out-of-the-box functionality to help L&D administrators understand how much usage the courses and their resources/activities are getting across all the users.

It’s possible to build additional reports, but it’s all at a cost.

Hierarchical relationships

Within Moodle there is no concept of a manager who looks after a team of people and needs to see their activity across a number of different courses.

In fact there is no hierarchy at all. There are different roles within courses, or within the whole site, but no way to model a management structure.

Summary

As I said, I think Moodle’s a great product ... in the right context.

If you’re going to use it within a corporate environment you really need to go into it with your eyes open, and understand how you are going to work within the limitations of the software.

It may mean some compromises in how you and your learners use Moodle, or it may mean investing in additional code to make it do what you want. (That’s exactly what Kineo have done with their Totara version of Moodle, which has a number of corporate-focussed functions added, although there's less focus on the face-to-face element than many of the high-end learning management systems, like Saba and Cornerstone, offer)