My most lasting impression from the course was that the Moodle UI is unintuitive compared to other major LMSs. It is bare bones and yet very complicated. Perhaps the functionality and ability to scale make up for this, but I won’t know until I use Moodle for an actual class. I think the user interface is a clear weakness for both instructors and students, though it’s probably a bigger problem for the instructors trying to set things up. The documentation is also a little weak, and I sometimes had to go outside the moodle.org site to find answers to questions I had. Using Moodle might negatively affect the students’ impressions of any class I use it for.
Moodle’s strengths are mainly the strengths of any good LMS: The instructor can provide a blended learning environment or a completely online course. The instructor can deliver resources, assignments, schedules, and grades from one place. Moodle’s strengths for students include being able to work interactively online, for example, on discussion boards or on collaborative group projects. Students can also upload assignments in a variety of forms: text, links, various file types, etc. This allows for great flexibility in terms of the types of assignments the instructor can give. Communications are also an important strength for Moodle, with its chat room, forum, and messaging features.
I was really excited to take this class and learn how to use Moodle because I had heard about it from other educators, and I like to support open source software. After the course, I’m not so excited about using Moodle, but I will set up a course on moodlecloud.org and test it to see how well the administration tools let me manage a course. Some other features I want to practice more are customizing how the content appears on the course page, setting up a full gradebook, duplicating items (or a whole course), tracking completion, and giving feedback. After that, I should try to set up a Moodle server and see how well I can manage that side of things. Perhaps Moodle’s features for administration and customization are its real strengths – besides being free!