PEOPLE FOCUS - CIPD

PEOPLE FOCUS TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
Moodle for Training & Development
By Gary Mahon, Enovation Solutions
Gary Mahon, Sales Director with Enovation Solutions Ltd, presented the
Moodle Learning Management System at the Annual CIPD Learning &
Development conference.
If you are involved in learning and
development there are many features you
look for when it comes to evaluating a
course management system. These will
probably include: ease of use, the ability
to manage own and third party content,
remote access, active course participation
through assessment and collaboration
tools and intuitive features to allow for
the management of course participants.
Finally, in the current economic
environment when pressure is being put
on budgets, affordability and cost of
ownership are key concerns.
Moodle is an attractive alternative to
often expensive proprietary online
learning solutions. It is distributed
free of charge under open source
licensing. It has revolutionised the
industry and forced consolidation among
the incumbent providers. With over
37,000 registered sites in 204 countries,
its user numbers are in the tens of
millions. Some of the largest learning
institutions in the World are users of
Moodle, including The Open University
and UCLA. In Ireland, Moodle is used in
a very high proportion of 2nd, 3rd and
4th level institutions and is also being
increasingly taken up by businesses.
The product is easy to use both by course
administrators, content creators and
learners. It has comprehensive course
management activities such as
assignments and quizzes for assessment,
tools such as forums and chats to
encourage collaboration
and can include any
form of content – MS
Office, PDF, Audio,
Video etc. Importantly,
Moodle can also
manage standards
compliant third party
products (ECDL
packages etc) to offer
businesses further
flexibility in terms of
learning providers.
On top of all this,
Moodle provides
comprehensive reporting
features to allow for
tracking learner activity
within the system. In an
increasingly regulated
business environment
this is a key requirement
for compliance purposes.
So if you are looking at
implementing a course management
system make sure that you include
Moodle in your thinking. For more
information go to www.moodle.org or
www.enovation.ie/moodle
Enovation Solutions Ltd. provide software
consultancy to the Education,
Government, Financial and Health sectors.
Since 2003, Enovation have been
instrumental in driving the uptake of
Moodle in Ireland.
Correction Note
In the last edition of People Focus (p.42)
there were some errors regarding
Moodle. We apologise for the errors and
would like to clarify the following:
• Moodle did not grow out of
Blackboard and cannot be downloaded
from blackboard.com
• Moodle is an open-source application,
not open-access as stated
• A full version of Moodle is available
free to download from www.moodle.
org, not just the basic format
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