Moodlerooms, Inc

Moodle is a web application used to create online courses. Teachers are given course areas where they 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 using it.

Since, its first release in November of 2001, more than 21 million registered users in 199 countries use Moodle. It has been translated into 78 different languages, so that with flip of a switch, the software can be localized to your location.

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 to track changes about their ideas in an uncluttered, online environment.

Moodle is released under an open source software license. This 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 back to the Moodle core team, so that they can decide whether to fold them into the core.

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

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 teams 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 that 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 make learning spaces where participants 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, see Using Moodlerooms -> What is the Moodlerooms Enterprise Hosting Technology?

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 http://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 the 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.

Moodle 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 specifications, 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. Moreover, Moodlerooms' CTO, Stuart Sim, contributes significant time as a technical advisor to the IMS project, so that Moodle can help build a bridge towards future, seamless exchange of data between separate systems.

Moodle courses can be designed as a 100% online experience or, alternately, your traditional classroom instruction can be supplemented to create blended learning environment. In a Moodle “room,” instructors create activities and give learners the time and virtual-space to collaborate and to provide thoughtful, detailed and un-compromised feedback. Moodle eliminates the idea of a “missed class”: if a participant misses a class, a Moodleroom can keep her in the loop. If an instructor needs to chat with a learner 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 due in history). Some activities are 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.

Every time an instructor grades, rates or places a comment on submitted work, participants receive an email alert. This greatly reduces the lag 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 what activities are pending in all of their Moodle courses.

Moodle's gradebook provides for powerful record-keeping, reporting, and feedback tools for facilitators and participants. Further, data can be imported and exported from the gradebook in order to connect with external reporting systems.

Some people might not need training to pilot an airplane, 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 that content is chunked and organized is critical for a positive experience for students.

Instructors using a Moodleroom can also view powerful log charts that indicate when participants visit the site, review resources, and then submit assignments. At a glance, an instructor can know who is missing work and send them an email 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 be used in any Moodle installation. An elementary teacher in Rochester, New York, can archive an interesting Moodle course and send it to a university in Brazil. To restore an archived course, simply upload it to Moodle and press the “restore” link. With Moodle, good ideas can be duplicated and shared. In fact, Blackboard courses can be converted to Moodle with only a few clicks. There is no need to re-create the course; simply place it into Moodle.

When students post words in a public forum in Moodle, they are developing themselves as authors. They are shifting from a readership of one instructor to a classroom of peers.

One of Moodle’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 sixty 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-site safety instructor might want every writer to quote protocol.

A Moodleroom 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 a Moodleroom, this feedback about communication can be an expectation of the course.

In Moodle, 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, Moodle gives instructors tools to better understand how each participant is involved (or not involved) in a course.

Online learning can be a rich prospect: online courses can offer 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 more reflection from participants.

Moodle 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.

Community: A community of more than 330,000 users participate in a “Using Moodle” discussions at Moodle.org. Questions posed in the community forums are answered by developers and super-users.

Documentation wiki: Further, these participants have created a wiki documentation site at docs.moodle.org, which provides clarity about Moodle features.

Moodle also integrates the documentation site with every installation of Moodle. When an instructor is learning how to create activities within Moodle, they can look into the footer of the various pages and find a link to the documentation site. The link will send the instructor to a page in the wiki that is contextually appropriate.

Since the wiki is a shared, public document, Moodlers can borrow from the software documentation and customize it without fees.

Contextual support: Throughout Moodle, users can click on Contextual support links to access the main help files that come with the distribution. These files have been translated into 78 languages.

Moodle books: Moodlerooms also recommends two books: William Rice's "Moodle 1.9 E-Learning Course Development," and Jason Cole and Helen Foster's "Using Moodle (2nd Edition)."

The lead author of Moodle, Martin Dougiamas, indicates that user- uploaded content in Moodle will not be Section 508 compliant until instructors, too, are educated in the demanding requirements of the statute. However, within the hundreds of Moodle pages and thousands of combinations, the design team believes that pages are 99% compliant with the specification. Since Moodle is able to re-use content created by authoring tools, an institution can stay well-within the guidelines by generating qualified web accessible content in an authoring tool and then rendering it within Moodle.

In addition, the Open University (OU) of the UK (the world's largest online university) has provided a detailed and ongoing analysis of Moodle's accessibility to comply with the European Union's strict accessibility standards. The OU has contributed a dedicated team of developers who are constantly updating Moodle's code to meet accessibility standards, and all of this work is available to any system using Moodle. Dougiamas also indicates that if a component in Moodle is not compliant, it should be considered a bug, so that changes can be made to the core code immediately.

Moodle makes communication between people easier because it relies on asynchronous tools. A committee can create a Moodle course to discuss important topics and actions. A department can create a Moodle course where instructors discuss strategies, share ideas, and literally create materials together. A dean or manager can create a Moodle space to communicate with a team about projects. Further, since Moodle users can have multiple roles in different environments, student can be given Moodle 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 Moodle 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 Moodle.

Moodle 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, allows for advisors to review course placement, then you can often build bridges from it to Moodle. SCT Banner and Peoplesoft are great examples of this kind of integration. We say "often" because sometimes software doesn't offer APIs (tools that help link internal data to external sources).

Moodle also does not offer Web Meeting tools (live video and audio chat, or whiteboards). You can do live text chats in a Moodle classroom, but otherwise, you'll want to connect Moodle to one of the many fine Web Meeting tools on the market. We like the existing Moodle integrations with Wimba, Elluminate, WizIQ, and Dimdim.

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 back a percentage of their revenue to the Moodle core developer Trust, so as to support their valuable work. 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.

Moodlerooms is the world’s largest Moodle Partner. State of the Industry Hosting Technology and Enterprise Support systems distinguish Moodlerooms from smaller partners. Corporate clients like Intel and Cisco, trust the Moodlerooms systems, and provide the confidence for our 400+ schools and smaller businesses.

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, 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.

Moodlerooms has shifted from the "dedicated server for each client" model to a clustering paradigm. This provides us with three major advantages:


1. Dedicated servers have down-time, like any server, so if your dedicated server goes down, what is the fail-over plan? Moodlerooms believes that creating redundancy for a single dedicated box by purchasing a fail-over server, along with load balancing tools is an inefficient use of hardware, energy and funds. Instead, Moodlerooms uses Solaris 10 containers, which provide dedicated and distinct resources to clients, while provisioning them onto clustered, load-balanced enterprise-level servers.
2. Moodlerooms has divided Moodle's application and the database into clusters, so that each element has its own environment and its tasks are independent and efficient. Clusters can be easily scaled without any interruption in services by adding more resources (servers) when it becomes necessary.
3. Moodlerooms has created a handful of "baseline" Moodles. These baselines are stable builds of the various versions of Moodle. Some of the bases are also enhanced with add-on features like third-party modules or blocks. Each client becomes aligned to one of the baselines. This structure allows Moodlerooms to provide instant, global bug-fixes. It also allows us to focus considerable monitoring tools on just a handful of code.

Moodlerooms, Inc. was incorporated in September 2005. However, the company has been performing Moodle Services for 2+ years as Moodlerooms, Inc. and 2 prior years as Thinking Distance.

In its past fiscal year, Moodlerooms’ revenue grew at a rate of 1000 percent. This dramatic increase is due in large part to Moodlerooms’ strong commitment for delivering high quality products and service, and 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, the offices that Moodlerooms established 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.

Moodle's open source license allows developers full access to integrate Moodle with various systems. Moodlerooms has expertise integrating Moodle into Student Information Systems like Banner SCT, Peoplesoft and Datatel.

All Moodlerooms clients have free peer-to-peer support through the Moodlerooms Community. Standard and Premier packages include Support/Help Desk in the form of tickets. If your organization is interested in extending support to all users the Support/Help Desk package can extend support down to students or participants.

Clients have access to the Moodle Administration panel. Files of 200MB can be uploaded to the installation using the Moodle file system.

Clients with a custom theme can have these provisioned and attached to the site by the Moodlerooms team.

A number of third-party tools are available with the baseline. Please see the chart.

Organizations with accounts for synchronous tools like the ones above can use the Moodle plug-in modules (adjust the settings first), to integrate the tools with Moodle. Please see the following chart for plug-in availability.

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 the Moodle for clients.

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

Moodlerooms uses clustered servers to balance resources and make them redundant. If a client were on a cluster of 5 servers, 4 of them could "go down" and the service would still work.

Moodlerooms provides under 3 second average server response time.

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.

The standard Moodle logo theme can be branded with your school or organizations logo. Moodlerooms allows for the provisioning of a custom theme and unique URL at the creation of each account.

Moodlerooms has used LDAP to integrate a number of services. If you are looking to use LDAP or web services to tie Moodle into your existing systems contact our customization team to schedule a needs assessment.