What is Moodle?

What is Moodle?
Moodle has a very large installed base of well over 100,000 all over the world.

Moodle is a learning management system that lets you provide documents, graded assignments, quizzes, discussion forums, etc. to your students with an easy to learn and use interface. Moodle is developed by a worldwide effort of over 75,000 students, faculty, and staff at over 6500 institutions around the world, coordinated by the main site at Moodle.org.

Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that people can develop additional functionality.

Why use Moodle?
Moodle saves HSU much needed resources at a critical time in our history. Since Moodle is free to use, using it could save the HSU ~$15,000 in our current Blackboard license costs. However, Moodle also offers ýEnterpriseý features such as integration with the WebReg database for course set-up and enrollment. These enterprise level features save faculty and staff time, while making it easier for students to focus on learning.

Blackboard Enterprise costs over $60,000/year and would require $130,000 to set up (based on a 2003 estimate), and would still not give us the same feature set we are able to achieve with Moodle. Moodle provides more instructional tools than Blackboard and new tools can be and are being built by faculty and technology staff at HSU, San Francisco State University, and many other educational institutions in the US and around the world. Lastly, the open source philosophy that Moodle is built on is a good fit with the academic principles of open research, open science, and open access.