Moodle

Now, call me behind the times. I just stumbled upon http://adlcommunity.net/ which is undeniably significant evidence of the Moodle LMS's entry into the mainstream. This is great news for those of us striving for a new era beyond the stranglehold the corporate LMS vendors have maintained for years. Anyone familiar with industry-specific software will understand the need for competition in these venues. Let's welcome the gentrification of the corporate LMS!

ADL is the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative of the federal government.

If you haven't heard, Mahara in an up and coming open platform for electronic portfolio and social networking. Sure, there are tons of social networking "web 2.0" doo-dads out there but this one is angled toward the e-Learning industry and grew out of the same general community as the excellent [and also free] Moodle LMS. There are even plans to integrate the two complementary packages.

I asked Penny Leach, one of the Mahara developers in New Zealand, what she envisions as potential applications for the platform:  read more »

I had first heard of Moodle while attending a conference in California some years ago. The presentation was done by a (Australian?) University administration person or teacher who was using it to enrich instructor-led classroom material. I was of course interested initially due to its low price [a reasonable $0], open source, and architecture [PHP], but I became further invested once I'd installed it. It really is quite full-featured and given the erstwhile limited gamut of commercial LMS's, it brings something to the table. Especially taking into account its ability to integrate community learning features and a rich user heirarchy, it goes beyond its peers in some respects.  read more »