Why Your Organization Needs Moodle

Why Your Organization Needs Moodle

by | Jun 10, 2020 | Backend

The novel Coronavirus has provided a stimulus to the online learning. Researches from all over the world show that more and more businesses and educational institutions are embracing online teaching and learning. In such unexpected times, the role of LMS (Learning Management System) has become more critical than ever. That is why the demand of Moodle, an open-source software, has witnessed manifold increase since the last few months. Its robust, secure, and integrated system has helped businesses and universities to continue discharging essential services.

It is pertinent to mention that Moodle was most widely open-source LMS even before the pandemic because of its learning-centric tools, and tremendous compatibility with businesses and educational institutions of all nature, however, since early 2020, it has collaborated with global academic, and business stakeholders to foster online learning objectives. It would not be wrong to say that Moodle is the future of online teaching and learning and the quicker your organization embraces this online learning platform, the better it will be. The below paragraphs will validate this notion.    

What is Moodle   

Moodle, developed by Martin Dougiamas in 2002, is an open-source Learning Management System that is designed to provide an effective online learning platform to educators, businesses, and administrators. Being the most popular LMS, Moodle ensures a robust, integrated, interoperable, and highly-functional system to create personalized and private learning environments. Moodle has been adopted by all levels of educational institutions, businesses, non-profit organizations, and other community systems of all nature because of its tremendous scalability, and adaptability. It helps businesses to create a collaborative learning space that stimulates both learning and teaching.

Why Educational Institutions Need Moodle

Moodle is used by more than 60% of educational institutions in over 180 languages and dialects all across the world. It helps teachers, and educators to create quality online classrooms to improve the learning outcomes for students. This System fosters online learning objectives of your organization because:

Inexpensive

It is an open-source software which means it is free to download, customize, and use according to your requirements. It is a perfect solution for organizations having budgetary constraints. Having customer support from more than 80 certified Moodle Partners, you can better customize the performance of the Moodle site. So, anyone can use it for both commercial and non-commercial online teaching and learning.

Moodle is Scalable and Flexibility

The best thing about Moodle is that it provides a highly flexible learning environment for your organization, be it small or large. Since it is an open-source software, it can easily be customized to individual needs. It uses free plugins to integrate external applications to achieve specific goals and functionalities. It can be scaled to support the requirements of a few to millions of students in small, and large educational institutions.

Enhanced Security and Privacy

Many people have the misconception that Moodle is less secure software compared to its closed-source alternatives. But in reality, it is a highly secure and private platform with regular security updates by developers to ensure users‘ data security and privacy, and provide multiple-tier protection against data loss, misuse, and unauthorized access. Moreover, if you want complete control, you can easily deploy Moodle on any private secure cloud or server.

Accessibility and Compatibility

Moodle is specifically designed to help all learners access it from anywhere. Its default mobile-compatible interface and cross-browser compatibility, it can be accessed from many web browsers, and devices. 

Up-to-Date and Future Proof

Having support from over 80 certified Moodle Partners, it is regularly reviewed, updated and customized to meet the evolving needs of educators. Similarly, you can secure your investment by integrating the LMS with other digital tools, and technologies to create an effective and interoperable online learning ecosystem.  

In short, Moodle offers an all-in-one learning platform to enhance the learning outcomes of educational institutions. From quizzes, online exams, and live discussions to online grading, Moodle has become the standard online platform for over 1/3rd of the universities and countless schools and colleges across the world.

Why Business Organizations Need Moodle LMS?

The role of Moodle in improving the efficiency of workplaces cannot be over-emphasized. It can help your business grow in a myriad of ways.

Starting from employee onboarding, Moodle helps to create a perfect virtual workplace to hire new workers, train them, and help them understand policies, procedures, and culture of your organization in the simplest possible way. This methodology offers significant cost savings. 

Similarly, Moodle helps to enhance the development and retention of employees. You can use this platform to design courses that will help to better train and evaluate your employees and keep them up-to-date with market trends. At the end of the day, it will greatly help you optimize your company, boost sales, gain more revenue, and expand the reach of your products.

Likewise, Moodle cloud-based service offers 24/7 availability and accessibility to learning. In the light of prevalent pandemic, it is the best option to allows all the employees to learn from a single platform while sitting at homes. This single-source learning provides a centralized, coherent training, and evaluation mechanism for your organization to better respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

Final Remarks

In a nutshell, Moodle has become a standard learning platform for hundreds of thousands of educators and businesses. Its extraordinary adaptability to all types of educational and business environments makes it the best open source LMS software in the world. Hence, it can help your organization achieve the set objectives in this digital era of cut-throat competition.

Organizations switching to online teaching for Students and onboarding employees

Organizations switching to online teaching for Students and onboarding employees

by | Jun 8, 2020 | DevOps

The novel coronavirus has brought such unforeseen disruptions in all aspects of our lives that we haven’t thought in our wildest dreams just a few months back. From businesses to academia, and from politics to worship, no facet of human life is left unaffected by this global pandemic. All the countries around the globe have placed severe lockdowns and stringent SOPs to enforce social distancing and minimize the contagion. According to medical researchers, social distancing has become a reality and we have to live with it, at least, for a foreseeable future.

Under such circumstances, it is virtually impossible to hold regular classes in schools and colleges or conduct in-person interviews to hire and train new employees. For many companies, it wreaked havoc, but others adapted modern technology and digital tools to continue providing services to the people and avoid the total shut down of their supply chains. That is why online onboarding new employees with LMS (learning management system) has become a new normal and more and more companies are shifting towards online training of their workers.

Similarly, majority educational institutions have embraced online teaching which rhymes exactly with working from home. This exponential growth of online learning has put much load on the learning management system (LMS), an EdTech platform, and almost all the universities and colleges in North America and elsewhere have almost completely transitioned to virtual or distant learning. The chart showing the transition of higher education enrollments in Canada and America is:

A chart from Enrollment Transition in North America

Online Learning During Pandemic

Needless to say, Covid-19 has significantly affected the field of education. Online teaching and learning have become more necessary than ever as around 1.2 billion students were out of classrooms due to the closure of educational institutions. In such times, we witnessed a dramatic rise in the usage of Moodle and other LMS around the world. Research studies conducted during the past few weeks show an exponential growth in the usage of online learning management systems like Moodle.  As per data from LMS and Moodle Usage.

  • Instructure: Witnessed a 60% increase in concurrent users on LMS Canvas in just two weeks.
  • Blackboard: It saw an increase of 400% in the total number of logins for the Learn LMS, and almost 3600% increase in the number of virtual classrooms.
  • Moodle: The usage of Moodle has increased significantly during a pandemic. We cannot predict the exact number of users at any time however, the total number of sites registered with Moodle increased by 30% in a single, and similarly, the use of Moodle Cloud also increased by 4-times during last few weeks.
  • In the same way, Schoology witnessed a 4x increase in its LMS usage from the previous maximum.

It is pertinent to mention that there already was a stimulus towards online teaching and learning before Covid-19 and the total investments in this filed (EdTech) were around $19b in 2019, but, not surprisingly, it is forecasted to reach more than staggering $350b by 2025, thanks to Covid-19. It shows how many companies and universities are investing in online learning tools to offset the losses caused by Covid-19. From open-source LMS like Moodle, and video conferencing tools to video tutoring and online boarding, the world has witnessed an exponential boost in the usage of digital tools for online learning and teaching.   

Employees Online Onboarding During Covid-19 Era

It is projected that LMS (learning management system) will accelerate employees online boarding and training in the years to come. It is no more a luxury or perk used by tech-giants to bring in new workers rather a new normal that all the companies have to acquaint themselves with. The majority of companies including Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google have instructed their employees to work from home since many critical and essential businesses cannot afford to have complete shutdown so they are resorting to virtual onboarding and working to continue providing essential services to the people. Almost all the workplace tasks like hiring new employees through in-person interviews, acclimating to the company’s policies and culture, and learning required skills to carry out individual and team-roles are being done by online boarding.  

Data from Udemy

Udemy is the largest online teaching and learning platform. It released a report on April 30 to analyze the surge in its customers due to Covid-19. The statistics shows:

  • 4.25x increase in consumer enrollment.
  • Instructors created 55% more content
  • Businesses and governments have used the Udemy platform almost 80% more than pre-COVID levels. 

To conclude, it would be wrong to say that because of Covid-19, every domain of human life is affected especially education and employment as governments imposed stringent lockdown to ensure social distancing. However, it provided an unprecedented stimulus to online teaching and learning and all the educational institutions and businesses are resorting to remote education, online boarding, and telecommuting. That is why the usage of LMS like Moodle has witnessed tremendous surge and this trend is likely to only increase in the future.