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Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Choose Moodle for Your Learning Management System
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July 24, 2020A Learning Management System (LMS) is an online application that allows your organization to provide educational content and resources to your employees, clients, or students. It’s a highly efficient and responsive way to not only create and deliver informational content, but to monitor participation and assess performance among users. An LMS could be your go-to solution for providing instructional content in nearly any scenario, including:
- Providing effective and consistent staff training,
- Teaching customers about features and how to use your product,
- Certifying users who attain industry-recognized skills,
- Demonstrating compliance with regulatory, legal, or technical requirements,
- Educating and evaluating students in an online environment,
- Serving learning opportunities to users whenever, wherever, and on whatever platform is convenient for them,
- Awarding continuing education credits (CEC) to clients as a value-added benefit,
- And more.
For a full-featured, no- to low-cost LMS, you can’t beat Moodle, the world’s most popular learning platform. Moodle lets you create a centralized, simplified, private learning space online, complete with engaging activities, full customization, and robust tracking and reporting. What’s more, since Moodle is an open source platform, you retain full control and ownership of all your content and all user data on how your staff, customers or students interact with the system.
Best of all, you can get started at zero cost to download the platform on your company server and host the application yourself. And that’s just for starters! Here now are the top five reasons to choose Moodle as your learning management system.
# 1 – Moodle Is Affordable and Scalable for Any Size Enterprise.
There are three options to start using Moodle as your learning management system.
- Download, install, and self-host the application on your own server. The cost is free forever, for an unlimited number of users, and you can customize to your heart’s content. You get full Moodle functionality, complete documentation, step-by-step Moodle training online (of course!), more than 1,700 plugins to handle nearly any special need you can think of, and robust support from a worldwide community of Moodle users, developers, and members of the Moodle HQ team.
- Run it on the MoodleCloud server. Free to try for 45 days and up to 200 users. This is the ideal low-cost solution for small to medium organizations. After your trial you can choose plans from 50 to 500 users annually, at a total cost of less than $100 a year up to $750 a year. (Costs in U.S. dollars are accurate as of July, 2020. Check current prices in Australian dollars here.)
- Set up your learning system with a Certified Moodle Partner. Moodle Partners rely on their years of education and Moodle experience to create the best solution for your organization, including hosting, integration, customization, support and training, consultancy, implementation, reporting/analytics, courseware, and more. Cost varies per partner and program.
# 2 – Moodle Has a Dedicated Platform for Staff Learning and Development.
Even before COVID-19, a growing number of businesses had begun allowing more employees to work from home. Given the coronavirus pandemic and social distancing, working from home has become the new normal, and it’s likely to remain so even after health officials sound the all clear.
Just as companies have come to accept employees working from home, learning and development (L&D) professionals also are increasingly focusing on training employees online. In 2020, 57% of L&D professionals report they spend more time with online learning now than they did three years ago.
Moodle Workplace was created to meet the specific needs of organizations seeking to provide training, professional development, and ongoing learning to workers. The platform helps L&D professionals, administrators, and managers efficiently organize and automate the learning environment, training goals, and evaluation process. In addition to saving time, Moodle Workplace will help you achieve consistent, reliable results in training your staff. You can use the platform to:
- Create learning criteria and instructional content by job function, department, location, product line, or practically any other identifying attribute,
- Set up learning goals that go beyond a single class or course, and track users’ progress along the way,
- Proactively alert employees who require training to remain in compliance with regulations, laws, or industry standards,
- Automatically track the learning progress of workers subject to continuing education (CE) requirements to retain their jobs,
- Save time using automated reporting customized for individuals, teams, or entire departments,
- And much more.
#3 – Moodle Workplace is Fully Optimized for Mobile.
A recent study shows 71% of employees want to choose where and when they participate in training. With Moodle, you can make learning accessible to workers anywhere in the world, at any time, on whatever device they prefer. No matter where your employees are, their training remains consistent, engaging and personalized to them. In particular, the Moodle mobile learning platform can help you:
- Make learning convenient, and make educational content easy to access. Whether using the mobile app online or offline, workers have incredible flexibility to continue learning whenever it’s most convenient for them, with or without Internet access.
- Boost usage and engagement. 94% of smartphone owners carry their phones with them frequently and 82% say they never or rarely turn their phones off. With the Moodle mobile app, users simply tap the icon and pick up their training wherever they last left off.
- Achieve higher completion rates and better outcomes. Studies show that if training is available to users wherever they go, instantly available at the touch of a button, and fully customized to their needs, users will respond with higher completion rates and more positive results.
- Engage next-generation employees. An entire generation of workers now entering the workforce has grown up connected to the Internet on their mobile phones 24/7/365. For millennials, Gen Z, and whoever next comes through your door, your learning strategy must be relevant to them, and cater to the mobile natives already in the workforce, as well as those who are to come.
- Encourage microlearning. Learning in small chunks has proved to increase retention and promote a greater sense of accomplishment in learners. Forget deadly hours-long PowerPoint decks in stuffy conference rooms. Moodle mobile is the ideal environment to provide meaningful, memorable bursts of educational content to your staff.
# 4 – Moodle is Fully Customizable to Your Brand.
Few things are as jarring — and potentially suspicion-arousing — as clicking a web link and suddenly being transported to a page with a radically different design, color scheme, look, and feel. As an open-source platform, Moodle gives you full control of your own learning management system. You can customize it with the features that are meaningful to your audience, and extend your site design to showcase your brand, not theirs.
You have additional flexibility in applying thousands of existing Moodle plugins and themes — or you can even design your own! Moodle plugins can be used to extend the core features of the LMS or handle particular situations specific to your business. There are currently more than 1,700 plugins available covering everything from activities, statistics, gradebooks, and reports… to admin tools, media players, document converters, Microsoft Office integrations and so much more.
Moodle templates and graphical themes let you quickly create a terrific-looking learning module without spending a lot of time or web development resources. You can use these templates and themes to change the look and functionality of an individual page or an entire course. Like everything else in Moodle, they’re easy to implement and fully customizable. You’ll find templates appropriate to the entire range of learning possibilities, including corporate communications, employee training, and academic education. They’re a convenient way to get your LMS looking great and up and running quickly. Then you can further customize them over time to more fully integrate with your brand.
# 5 – Moodle Is Simple to Start, Maintain, and Operate.
There’s a learning curve, of course, for every new online application or platform. But Moodle was designed with self installation and hosting in mind. As a result, the technical hurdles are far lower than usual. For self-directed users, it really is as simple as downloading a free installation file from the Moodle website. From there, you can start building your online learning site in minutes.
Once installed, the learning curve is gentle for administrators and users, as well. The modern, easy-to-use interface is responsive and simple to navigate whether on desktop or a mobile device. You’ll enjoy full integration and seamless connection with other services and applications you already run, including Google Apps, Microsoft Office 365, NextCloud and more. Because the platform is open source, you always retain complete ownership and control of all content and data in your LMS.
Thousands of community-created extensions, plugins, and themes are available for free, to add extra functionality, personalization, and customization for learners, admins, and teachers. A fully customisable Report Builder centralizes and simplifies normally time-consuming tasks such as creating progress reports, tracking attendance and participation, and performing evaluations and follow ups.
The learning process for your employees or students is simplified, as well. Long past are the days of classrooms and conference rooms, training sites, scheduling, the availability of instructors, travel time and expense, and all the other costs and hassles associated with old-school learning. Moodle makes it easy on everyone involved to do their learning when, where, and how it’s convenient for them. As a result, they participate more willingly, when they’re more highly self motivated to do so. As a result, your employees or students will learn more, and learn better.
It’s no wonder digital learning has rapidly become the method of choice among students, teachers, workforces, corporate administrators, and L&D professionals alike. Nothing else provides the multiple benefits of reduced cost for all involved, greater convenience, increased usage, better results, and more positive outcomes.
As a business owner in a fast-paced, rapidly changing commercial environment, employee productivity and efficiency are critical to keeping your business competitive. The Moodle learning management system can give them the advantage they need, and save you an enormous amount of time, effort, and money into the bargain.
READY TO TAKE THE NEXT STEP?
We have seen websites of all shapes and sizes, from brilliant to completely dysfunctional. Your site may live solidly in the middle of the bell curve in this regard, however that doesn’t mean your site couldn’t stand to benefit from some amount of modernization. Just like all other technology, the technology of websites is constantly evolving and changing. Often times, elements of a site which were highly effective when a site was built lose their effectiveness over time; and depending on the nature of your business, you may not even realize how significantly even a small issue can affect your business.
While it may be difficult to fully comprehend and validate the decision to move forward and modernize, it is important to keep in mind that time flies as it relates to technology and user expectations fly right along with it. Your website is a 24-hour, 7-day a week representation of your organization online. It needs to properly showcase your brand, your message and your mission. It should drive results, rather than hinder your efforts.