Moodle: Open-Source LMS
moodle.org
moodle.org
I suspect, much like ticketing and project management systems, LMS software is always going to be awful -somehow- because of competing desires from different users, and that as such "the least amount of awful amongst the ones I've dealt with" should probably be considered a (qualified) endorsement.
However, that doesn't seem to be any better in any other web CMS, and Moodle is extendable with lots of open source plugins for any imaginable purpose, so overall it's a powerful Swiss army knife, and it has all the advantages of a self-hosted, open source project.
I suspect the 80/20 rule is in play, wherein each of the 80% of users is using a different 20% of features so your choices are to end up with something nearly feature free (think early github issues for a ticketing example), something specialised to a specific vertical subset of the potential use cases, a complex and usually clunky GUI, or programmatic style configuration that requires a level of time investment that rules out the people whose jobs will be to actually use it being the ones to set it up.
Moodle goes the lots-of-features GUI route and does a less annoying job of it than average - like I say, I think the problems are kinda inherent if your goal is to support as many different purposes as it does, and that's a trade-off that's often worth making.
Thats what SQL is for. You can setup everything using their fairly simple tables, and keep it in sync with whatever registration system you're using.
Permissions however were confusing and forget about faculty understanding them.
1. There's no common area for teachers. I cannot have common resources. For example, I like to have some ground rules for all my courses; cannot have them stored in a common space to import them to any course opened.
2. So many steps are repetitive and cumbersome without any possibility of automating them. For example, I can devise an activity and set up a carefully crafted rubric for grading. There's no way to store that rubric elsewhere so I could reuse it for another, similar activity either in that same course or in another.
3. No possibility of mass uploading files except when in a folder.
4. No possibility of customizing an activity or resource per-teacher. If any, is either school-wide or nothing.
5. I need a custom Web font (for some language I teach) but it's extremely difficult to configure that school-wide. Teacher-specific it's just impossible.
and the laundry list could go on and on and on. These are little details, but enormous time wasters.
The 'almost' is because e.g. RT or JIRA -can- be configured such that they provide exactly the details and workflow that each team/queue wants and end up being almost pleasant to work with, but putting in the necessary business analysis time and having somebody learn their configuration and scripting facilities sufficiently to actually achieve that is something I only encounter very occasionally.
There was a separate system that would handle paging on user defined rules based on priority and aforementioned hierarchy.
I've managed a Moodle install for my university for many years without any hiccups. I've trained lots of teachers on how to use it BUT usually they would just figure it out by themselves because it's quite intuitive.
A little optimism and positivity doesn't hurt now and again.
But, it's one of the few LMSs designed post-Web 2.0 so things that require a refresh or reload in BB, etc., generally happen much more smoothly.
These days I like Brightspace (aka D2L) the best, but that could be just because the way I interact with it.
(I write LMS integrations for a living).
This was about 8 years ago now, IDK if it got worse or better since then.
And I stopped caring for the moodle-community after I found a forum-post (in 200X) which outlined all the problems they have today and got told: f** off, you don't know how to program.
The back end is still quite competitive and mostly just works. Classic PHP advantages at play here. The project won't die anytime soon.
PHP is the gold standard for "it will run forever" in web- new patterns with the goal of faster iteration speed often doesn't pan out the way devs expect. (probably the reason why another language hasn't overtaken the LMS space yet).
We were one of the few colleges that used the most up-to-date version of Moodle when it came out. One year, Moodle replaced its default grading setting with something called (if I recall correctly) Natural grading. We tested it and had professors try it out.
Natural grading seemed fine at first, but then professors started noticing issues after a couple of days. The math just didn't seem right. We went through multiple courses, looked at grades, and calculated averages - everything was slightly off! We switched all classes that tried the new grading back to the old default.
No one could really figure out what was going on. It wasn't exactly clear what math they were using.
As it turns out, we were one of the very few that updated to the latest version. We even got a phone call from a university that saw we were using the newest version and asked what we did to solve the natural grading issue.
Another time, a year or so later, I went to submit some homework through Moodle. I realized that my professor used the wrong setting for his assignments, making it so that I couldn't re-submit an assignment.
I could have logged into my administrator account and helped him, but that also would get me very, very fired (and possibly jeopardize me being a student).
Instead, I inspected the UI and realized that Moodle was actually rendering all buttons, and then using CSS to hide them based upon the settings the professor chose. I un-hid the submission button, and then re-submitted my homework.
At the end of the day, Moodle was pretty good. Despite these experiences, I still view it very fondly.
Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/1053/
This thread is 50% "this software is garbage" and 5p% "why was this posted here".
Seems a low hanging fruit for the scythe of moderation to me.
It's not a new project, so if it's a TIL this is a thing, then post that, if its "Moodle releases x.0" then post that. The focus of the page seems to be mostly on an upcoming conference in Europe, is that what the OP wants us to see? I'm clicking on it wondering if there's something new to see?
If its new, usually you put a Show HN: in front of it. If it's new to you, put TIL as you mentioned, nothing at all is just confusing and I feel like I'm missing something.
This is coming from someone who tried out a Moodle server at a college I worked at in 2003-5. I get new people are discovering it, but that's like me posting a link to Debian's homepage, or Apache with no context because it's new to me.
None of the responses have been the OP clarifying their intention, which is who the question was for anyway. What does OP want me to see on their page?
Case in point: I had a course and wanted to publish my excel-grading-sheet to a moodle course: 1) there is hardly any documentation on how to do that... 2) from the one paragraph I pieced together the primitive XML-spec. Now people had the points for their work. 3) it would be nice to give people a total of points? BUT: there is no way to do that nicely - I was presented with a formula editor (including: trigonometric functions...), where I could put together individual exercise ids BY HAND (summation with regex might be more useful than trig, no?) 4) students complained: I handed in the tasks and don't have points yet 5) turns out: the XML-parser they use stops at UTF8 and the person who coded that thought: "hey, we print 'import successful' and just stop the import at the specific entry we couldn't handle, partially updating the DB"
Also there is of course no API of any sorts (so automation is impossible...), which is no wonder if your development is stuck at .php-files intermingling code and html...
When I think about it, most options related to time-limiting something, or quizes/tests, were so complicated for most of them that they would hack around it by reusing the same items, expiring them in 2099 and then (I guess) manually changing visibility for those present in the room. Then all hell breaks loose when they didn't update the questions correctly and you get like 0% for all correct answers, or they get the results for all 1500 people who ever attended the class, then they manually filter it out for current-year students. Often, our tests would begin like "Do you see it in the Moodle? No? And now? And now? OK, now? Now? Still nothing?".
This was on an ICT college where you'd expect more computer savvy people. But even there, the problems were happening too often to be able to blame users. It's just awful UX.
Before Moodle we used to get nicely formatted PDF's (made with Latex I pressume). This might sound like a nitpick, but if you are spending hours reading the material over and over it is a pretty serious drawback. I don't undesrtand how moodle does not have a decent reader mode builtin. Also, I have always been the learning type that prints out the PDF and the draws, underlines, writes in it while reading it. Dunno, reading on screen just doesnt work for me that well.
Is it one of those checkboxes that would be required or heavily weighted while doing an evaluation/bidding process?
When I was in college, a lab needed to replace some equipment and had to go through the bidding process. They had to develop objective criteria that the bids would be judged against with a scoring system and requirements.
It took some real effort to write the criteria such that they would not end up with a really awful system from a vendor who was known to have awful support, but not write it in an exclusionary fashion.
> Is it one of those checkboxes that would be required or heavily weighted while doing an evaluation/bidding process?
It might be, yes. But only heavily weighted by those entities, who peddle such very basic learning material and don't have interactive components, except for maybe some very basic quiz. When you develop a new LMS and try to make a business out of it, you will probably sooner or later get in contact with such entities, who would like to push their content into your newly developed platform and have some SCORM artifact. So they ask you whether your platform is SCORM compatible.
But anyway, mostly it will not be worth it, if you want modern courses with nice interactive features. SCORM will only slow you down.
Video content seems not to be its main concern, but I can imagine that it is hard to scale if people want to use it to deliver video.
All colleges I ever went to used moodle and when I was teaching college courses, I was using it too. We even had an integrated Java code runner to automate programming exercise hand ins. Learning curve is gentle.
Any pointers for alternatives?
But it is very dated by now. Not so much in its look and feel (which definitely does not chase every hip refresh of the frontend world) but in terms of its overall backend design, its technical debt and ability to evolve as a platform (API's, content generation, plugin development etc).
With dramatic developments as we move into the Web 3.0 era (federated platforms, ML/AI) there is a question mark if the initiative and community have the vision, resources and execution ability to transform it into something that will be relevant ten years from now.
I hope it does. It would certainly be tremendous added value on top of everything that its has delivered so far.
Being downvoted by people "who know better" the state of Moodle so not inclined to spend further time on this.
The project was scrapped after a couple of months as community it was intended for decided to manage it themselves.
Moodle itself seemed like a neat project. I was impressed with the install wizard. I did have some reservations about the "everything is a plug-in" architecture: it seemed possibly too clever for its own good.