Moodle, an open source course management system, that uses pedagogical principles to create online learning communities. Briefly, pedagogical principles theorize that people construct new knowledge as they interact with their surroundings; everything their senses experience may form new knowledge and that knowledge is strengthened by using it. Moodle has the ability to be used by one instructor or by an institution with as many as 200,000 students.
Moodle has an extensive user community speaking over 70 languages in 196 countries. It is customizable, flexible and supported by programmers worldwide. There are several advantage to this software over others; individualized feedback is provided with all assignments and it makes it easier to track each student's class activity. Moodle customizes e-learning with over 300 modules, many of which have been created by teachers. Moodle encourages instructors to build modules to fit their subject and their style of teaching, making available a wealth of resources from those who actually use the software.
The newest version features a newly developed Gradebook and integrated support for Outcomes as well as tagging, a core function that links things like courses, users and external sites such as YouTube through the use of tags.
More importantly, student surveys comparing various teaching software strongly supported Moodle. Students reported improved interaction with classmates, improved problem solving skills, better interaction with the online instructor and good technical assistance. Fewer clicks are required to maneuver and Moodle has more tools (glossary, polls, etc) that are unavailable in other software. In a comparison of Moodle and another major online instructional software program, 57% of students stated they would like to enroll in another Moodle course, compared to 46% surveyed about other software.
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