Moodlerooms

Moodle Partners are vendors who are certified to provide Moodle services in territories around the world. Services include: hosting, training, support and customization.

All Moodle Partners contribute a percentage of their revenue to the Moodle Trust core developer fund in order to support their valuable work. In return, the Moodle core developers provide Partners with priority access for code fixes and support.

Vendors who advertise Moodle services without being Partners risk infringing on the Moodle trademark and are most likely not contributing any revenue to the project.

Learn more about our partnership with Moodle.

State of the industry hosting technology along with enterprise support systems distinguish Moodlerooms from smaller Moodle Partners. Corporate clients like Intel and Cisco trust the Moodlerooms systems and provide confidence for our 400+ schools and smaller businesses.

Learn about our unique approach to e Learning.

Moodlerooms strives to be the LMS provider most worthy of its clients; a truly supportive partner aligned with each customer's major goals. We listen and take an authentically client-centered approach to product development, community development, technical support and professional services. We work with great dedication to maintain ongoing relationships and plan and set priorities. We offer superior customer service and professional services to ensure the greatest success of those who depend on this critical system.

Learn more about Moodlerooms' mission, vision and values.

Moodlerooms hosts each client site on the largest Moodle cloud in the world, supported in our new world-class hosting facilities provided by Dell Services, formerly Perot Systems of Plano, Texas.

Through our partnership with Dell Cloud Services, a global leader in hardware and IT services, our clients have access to an infrastructure that offers real-time, on-demand scalability and industry-leading security. Through this partnership, Dell provides Moodlerooms with optimized hardware to administer on-premise hosting solutions as well as specialized access to its cloud data center.

Learn more about the largest Moodle cloud in the world.

Moodlerooms, Inc., was incorporated in September 2005. However, the company has been performing Moodle Services for three+ years as Moodlerooms, Inc. and two prior years as Thinking Distance.

In its last fiscal year, Moodlerooms’ revenue grew at a rate of 1,000 percent. This dramatic increase is due, in large part, to Moodlerooms’ strong commitment for delivering high-quality products and service as well as its dedication to significantly reducing the cost that clients experience due to “vendor lock” brought about by unreasonably high annual licensing fees from proprietary software providers.

As an added benefit, Moodlerooms established offices last year in Vera Cruz, Mexico; Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, Argentina; Delhi, India; Amman, Jordan; Ely, UK; Quito, Ecuador; Orsa, Sweden; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Krakow, Poland, Thessoloniki, Greece; and four in the United States (two of which are minority contractors). This depth of knowledge and experience is extremely difficult for our competitors to match.

Learn more about the history of Moodlerooms.

Moodlerooms has developed a systems integration tool called Conduit that allows administrators to quickly load critical information from an existing SIS, ERP, assessment or other learning database into joule, including Datatel, PeopleSoft and Banner SCT.

All Moodlerooms clients have free peer-to-peer support through the Moodlerooms Community. We also provide valuable Administrator and End-User Help Desk solutions.

Learn more about our support offerings.

Clients have access to the Administration panel. Files of 200MB can be uploaded to the installation using the core Moodle file system. Clients with a custom themes can use Moodlerooms' enhanced theme feature to easily brand their site.

A number of third-party tools can be enabled upon request. Please see the available Moodlerooms-developed, Preferred Partner, Third-Party and Community-contributed features available through our mPower Program.

Moodlerooms can enable your desired synchronous Web conference software upon request.

After a major version release, the Moodle core team provides frequent stable updates to the version. The updates fix bugs and improve performance but do not introduce new features. In a traditional environment, Moodlers either "stick with a release" or perform hotfixes to their code with the core updates. The latter requires a high level of expertise.

Moodlerooms creates a baseline for each major release, then improves the code continuously with hotfixes and performance testing. By focusing on one single code base (and having every client on the particular baseline using it), Moodlerooms is able to identify and solve code issues very quickly. This provides an extremely stable version of Moodle for clients.

Moodlerooms uses clustered servers to balance resources and make them redundant. If a client were on a cluster of five servers, four of them could "go down" and the service would still work.

By having multiple servers in a cluster, hundreds of thousands of Moodlers can use the system concurrently without overloading any server's processing power.

Moodlerooms provides 2-second average server response time.

Learn more about our cloud hosting offering.

Clients are not required to move to the latest version. When new versions are made available, Moodlerooms will notify clients and they can request an update.

Moodlerooms allows for the provisioning of a custom theme and unique URL at the creation of each account. Our enhancements also make it easier for those with little to no design skills to change the appearance of your site or even individual courses. You can easily upload logos, change header and footer colors and update font styles with simple menu selections.

Moodlerooms has used LDAP to integrate a number of services. If you are looking to use LDAP or Web services to tie your learning environment into your existing systems, we can provide our systems integration tool, Conduit, to enable this.

Moodle is a web application used to create online courses. Teachers are given course areas where they can present curriculum (quizzes, discussions, resources, etc.) to students and interact with them using collaborative tools. Moodle also keeps records of grades, feedback and activity logs of the participants who are using it.

Learn more about Moodle.

Online communication allows instructors and learners some extra time and space to think before immediately responding. Discussions can be extended over days and months, rather than being juggled during a course period.

Collaborative tools provide ways for learners to share materials, learn from each other and track changes about their ideas in an uncluttered, online environment.

Learn about how you can improve teaching and learning with Moodlerooms.

Moodle is released under an opensource software license. This type of license allows you to download and use the software at no cost. You may also charge others to use the software, if you are maintaining it.

If, however, you change the code with improvements and plan to distribute your changes, you need to share those improvements with the Moodle core team so they can decide whether to include them in the core.

The lack of licensing fees with Moodle helps make it an affordable solution for learners around the world.

Since its first release in November 2001, more than 30 million registered users in more than 200 countries use Moodle. It has been translated into more than 80 different languages, so, with the flip of a switch, the software can be localized to your area.

Find out what institutions, schools, companies and organizations use Moodlerooms.

Moodle is an acronym for Modular Object Oriented Digital Learning Environment. It is also a word constructed from 'muse' and 'doodle'. Moodling is a process of creatively meandering through the various activities of a course, tinkering towards insight and creativity.

Moodle, Angel, Blackboard, Desire 2 Learn and Sakai are all systems that have similar feature sets. In 2007, the eLearning Guild selected Moodle from this competitive list as Best LMS for Education and Government Markets.

The Moodlerooms team spends every day with the Moodle code and knows it really well. With our servers and performance harnesses, we send data to the core team telling them where code needs to be optimized. You can do this, too, if you have some time on your hands. Moodlerooms also innovates by creating "Moodle baselines" which are stable builds of Moodle that fix various bugs. We update and performance test our baselines so our clients have the best code available to run their installations.

Moodle was constructed with the philosophy of social constructionism. In short, Moodle was designed to generate learning spaces where participants can create, share and discuss various ideas and artifacts. This active collaboration promotes a culture where learners are stimulated to be reflective about their existing beliefs and habits. For a complete description of the concepts, please visit this site: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Philosophy.

Yes -- on the largest Moodle cloud in the world, our clients have instant access to unlimited resources for infinite growth.

Moodle is maintained by a core group of developers headquartered in Perth, Australia (http://moodle.com/hq/). Folks interested in the maintenance of Moodle can use the community forums at www.moodle.org for feedback and discussions. The tracker at tracker.moodle.org is another rich resource for communicating with developers about the software.

But organizations that prefer a dedicated support team are encouraged to utilize Moodle Partners -- a network of companies around the world with expertise (http://moodle.com/partners/list/). By contracting with a Moodle Partner (like Moodlerooms), there is always a way to purchase and receive direct support for Moodle.

Our Moodle core exports its data into a Moodle XML structure. If you are moving Moodle courses from one installation to another, you can use a simple backup/restore feature to export data in and out of an XML archive. Moodle makes it simple. If you are moving an entire Moodle site, you can also export your database and archive your Moodle data files and transfer them to a different host.

Organizations like IMS (http://www.imsglobal.org/metadata/index.html) are striving to create universal standards for the packaging of learning objects. When they complete this specification, tools like Moodle will be able to export their data into a universal archive that could be imported by a different learning management system (LMS). These tools are incomplete but are critical for the future of LMS and schools. Moodle's XML data export is the most "universal" structure a LMS can use today.

Moodle courses can be designed as a 100% online experience or, alternatively, a supplement to your traditional classroom instruction to create a blended learning environment. In a Moodle “room,” instructors create activities and give learners the time and virtual space to collaborate and provide thoughtful, detailed and uncompromised feedback. Moodle eliminates the idea of a “missed class” -- if a participant misses a class, a Moodle room can keep him or her in the loop. If an instructor needs to chat with a student after hours, they can meet in an online chat room in Moodle or carry on a discussion in a Moodle forum.

Moodle offers 12 standard learning activities, as well as a variety of resource options. A resource in Moodle might be an individual file (like MS PowerPoint or MS Word files), a movie, a sound file or a Web page that an instructor places in logical sequences. As the course progresses, these activities and resources can be altered, added, hidden, removed and re-sequenced. The activity might be a quiz on the Trojan War, or it might be a lesson on safety standards on a construction site. Activities can be automatically graded (like a multiple-choice quiz) or require instructor feedback (like an essay). Some activities, designed for instructors to interact with students and others, focus on peer-to-peer interaction (like a forum discussion) or a class-constructed glossary or database.

Learn more about the features of Moodle.

Every time an instructor grades, rates or places a comment on submitted work, participants receive an e-mail alert. This greatly reduces the wait time between submitting work and receiving instructor comments. If desired, learners can check their progress and scores at any time from within Moodle, as well as double check what assignments are on the horizon.

A Moodle calendar integrates three levels of information: site events (assigned by the business or institution administrator), course events (assigned by the instructor) and personal calendar items (assigned by participants). In this way, a quick glance at the calendar will show participants pending activities in all of their Moodle courses.

Moodle's grade book provides for powerful record keeping, reporting and feedback tools for facilitators and participants. Data can also be imported and exported from the grade book in order to connect with external reporting systems.

Some people might not need training, but we believe there is great value in providing instructors with methodology and ideas so that they can create effective online communities. Online learning is different from face-to-face instruction -- the design of a course and the way content is grouped and organized is critical for a positive experience for students.

Learn more about our training courses.

Instructors using a Moodlerooms solution can view powerful log charts that document when participants visit the site, review resources and submit assignments. At a glance, an instructor can know who is missing work and send them an e-mail reminder. Moodlerooms lets instructors focus on teaching rather than shuffling paperwork or worrying about potential hardware or software issues.

Courses can be copied at any time and zipped into a simple archived file for safekeeping and use in any Moodlerooms installation. An elementary teacher in Rochester, NY, can archive an interesting course and send it to a university in Brazil. To restore an archived course, simply upload it and press the “restore” link. With Moodlerooms' solutions, good ideas can be duplicated and shared. In fact, Blackboard courses can be converted to our platform with only a few clicks. There is no need to re-create the course; simply place it into the LMS.

When students post in a public forum in our platform, they are developing themselves as authors. They are shifting from the readership of one instructor to an entire classroom of peers.

One of our platform's strengths is its ability for peers to privately rate each other’s work. Instructors can create custom rating scales like: "I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point;" or "That idea makes some sense;" or "I wish I had thought of this idea." It only takes a few days of receiving feedback like this from 60 peers for an author to begin to understand that what he says matters and could be stated more clearly.

Instructors can also give private (or public) feedback to a post. A science instructor can expect very specific diction in lab discussions; a literature instructor might demand evidence for every assertion; a construction safety instructor might want every writer to quote protocol.

An online learning environment can, therefore, promote and demand a higher level of communication from a participant than a traditional classroom. In a classroom discussion, it is impossible for speakers to receive detailed feedback from peers. In our platform, this feedback about communication can be an expectation of the course.

Learn more about how you can use Moodlerooms' solutions.

In Moodlerooms' platform, all interactions and exchanges between people and resources are recorded and available for constant review. An instructor can see levels of participation at a glance from a log report. He might, thereafter, choose to send a friendly note requesting more (or less) activity from a particular student.

Likewise, an instructor might review a full report of a participant or a full report of feedback that the student has received from the teacher. This review might trigger another note to the student or a subtle shuffling of course activities. In either case, Moodlerooms' platform gives instructors tools to better understand how each participant is involved (or uninvolved) in a course.

Learn more about how Moodlerooms' solutions can help you improve participation.

Online learning can be a rich prospect, offering profound advantages to instructors. Rather than trying to balance everything in the brief “class period” of a traditional day, an online instructor can create activities that stretch for days, encouraging deeper reflection from participants.
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Our platform provides rich logs which track user activity. These logs allow instructors and administrators to review when, where and what students access within the online classes.

Simple features, like "time-stamping" assignments when they are turned in, allow instructors to focus on teaching rather than paperwork.

Because department chairs and deans can be added as "invisible" instructors to the courses, teachers can also receive the extra support they may need from their peers and advisors.

Learn more about how you can use Moodlerooms' solutions.

Moodlerooms provides valuable documentation, tutorials and community support in its Resource center.

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is accessibility. If educational material is not accessible to students with unique needs, they are at a disadvantage. As an internationally developed tool, our Moodle core is designed to meet a variety of world accessibility requirements, including Section 508, Section 504 and W3C.

Moodle is the only open-source learning management system that is fully Section 508 compliant, and Moodlerooms works with California State Universitys compliance office to ensure Moodle remains that way. However, course creators must be careful to take proper precautions and use tools correctly, because even though Moodle itself is accessible, courses and imported content might not be. Because Moodle is able to re-use content created by external authoring tools, an institution can stay well-within accessibility guidelines by generating qualified Web accessible content in an authoring tool and then rendering it within Moodle.

Our solutions also support the use of assistive technologies such as screen readers, text magnifiers and speech-to-text solutions. Additionally, all functionality in joule is designed to be keyboard accessible. joule uses the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) for all JavaScript, which includes ARIA plug-ins that allow keyboard navigation. These plug-ins are enabled by default for Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer.

Our platform makes communication between people easier because it relies on asynchronous tools. A committee can create a course to discuss important topics and actions. A department can create a course where instructors discuss strategies, share ideas and literally create materials together. A dean or manager can create a space to communicate with a team about projects. Since users can have multiple roles in different environments, a student can be given courses to run school clubs or teams. In this instance, students may be the "instructors" or facilitators of the course. These rights and responsibilities do not bleed into other areas of the site, where they remain a student with limited access to materials. These are only a few examples of the flexible and valuable discussions that you can move from brick-and-mortar classroom meetings to an online learning environment using Moodlerooms.

Learn more about how you can use Moodlerooms' solutions.

Our platform was not designed as a student information system (SIS); however, it is often used as the e-learning complement to existing SIS systems. If you have software that registers students at your school, handles their financial records, places them in courses, provides transcripts and allows for advisers to review course placement, then you can build bridges from it to your Moodlerooms site. SCT Banner and PeopleSoft are great examples of this kind of integration.