Which LMS is Best?

By: JasonItec

Every year new open source learning managements systems hit the web, and this leaves educators’ heads spinning trying to find the best one for them.  It is very difficult to beat Schoology for its familiar social media-style dashboard and intuitive mobile app.  Also, Google Classroom blends seamlessly with Google Docs allowing students and teachers an easy way to collaborate as well as create and turn in assignments.  But, from an institutional perspective, Moodle probably offers the most adaptability and offers schools or even districts a way to create a custom LMS for their specific application.

 Moodle, based in Australia, is a learning management system which combines forums, blogs, and wikis along with online curriculum and coursework into a virtual learning environment. Teachers have the ability to customize the style, structure, and content of their virtual classrooms through Moodle, and the all-inclusive platform keeps everything organized for the students, parents, and teacher’s convenience. The best part about Moodle is that it is open-source, so teachers and/or school district administrators can set up a blended learning classroom or building without adding the cost of a pricey into the budget.

Logging into Moodle’s demo site as a teacher, all of the features are available to test. There is sample course content as well as students, and this allows for testing the online grade book by actually inputting grades and comments onto the sample assessments. A great tool in Moodle’s assessment generator is the ability to embed YouTube videos directly into the question. This adds another level of sensory modality that twenty-first century students need exposure to, especially considering similar questioning is used in the new digital PARCC assessments. Comparing it against similar learning management systems, it would be difficult to tell that Moodle is open-source given the quality of design and function.

Moodle brings to mind other popular open-source programs such as WordPress in that the popularity has prompted its users to create and share loads of customized themes and plugins that really ad to the versatility and appeal of the product. This allows teachers to create a fully-loaded and attractive LMS without the cost or countless hours of coding it would take to create it themselves. Another product of Moodle’s popularity is the growing amount of free shared content. Teachers are sharing information, lessons, and even full curriculum units amongst the community. In this respect, Moodle allows the user to learn from and utilize existing lessons in their respective content area. Why reinvent the wheel when it may only need polished?