During a recent chat with the Australian National University’s Professor Liz Deane the conversation turned to the university’s recent adoption of Moodle, an open source learning management system (LMS) that has, over the past few years, begun to sweep the floor clean of the expensive proprietary LMS systems traditionally used in higher education. According to Professor Deane, the decision wasn’t exclusively financial but was very much driven by an assessment of Moodle’s maturity, flexibility, ease of use for both students and teachers and its scalability (given that the intention was to roll it out for all faculties).

After the conversation I did a little digging around to see how many higher education institutions were jumping onto the open source, and particularly Moodle, bandwagon. Surprisingly, there is a very big swing away from the proprietary models with a number of Australian universities already using Moodle or in the process of integrating or evaluating it. In a document from the 2008 AuSakai conference there is a quote from Prof. Carole Kayrooz (PVC Education) heralding the adoption of Moodle:

… the adoption of Moodle is good news for our students as they will experience a friendlier and more student-focused online learning environment. I would like to thank all those who have managed to get us to this point in what is possibly the most important decision the University can make in relation to its teaching and learning. Prof. Carole Kayrooz, PVC Education

Only a couple of years before open source software  had been ‘explicitly excluded‘ from any consideration of a suitable LMS. Time flies fast in the digital world.

Open source software is now accepted as being an excellent base for many large-scale Internet projects and is being adopted by organizations large and small as being a solution that is not only technically mature but also provides unparalleled return on investment, a large developer base and significantly more reliable updates than the very costly systems offered as proprietary solutions. Moodle, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Magento are all widely used by organisations where there are mission critical requirements for stability, flexibility and scalability.

Despite the rather basic and unaesthetic user interface, Moodle has clearly proven itself in terms of its technical suitability for large educational organisations. And, as the software has developed and the demand for integration and customisation increased, new organisations such as praxMatrix have developed key services to roll out Moodle for large and medium organizations that do address the issues of integration, customisation and improved and aesthetically pleasing interfaces whilst retaining all of the underlying layers of functionality and stability.

If your organisation is thinking of adopting an LMS and are still stuck in a rather negative opinion of open source systems I would urge you to give us a call as we’d be happy to talk you through a Moodle integration and to demonstrate how and why Moodle is the LMS that you should be looking at  in terms of cost savings, return on investment and functionality.