Moodle

Comentarios: There is not really any cons about Moodle. It is a highly satisfying product that is worth a try.

Puntos a favor: First: It is free! As a student: it has easy navigation, provides a dashboard with all the related courses currently enrolled, it has a calendar on the right highlighting all the upcoming submission dates. It also notifies us about the upcoming events the lecture has set. All the information are arranged in a neat format. It shows the online users. It has portfolio option, makes it easy to keep track of all our works. It also has email facilities so we can email other users. As an administrator: There is so many features incorporated in Moodle! The teacher has the power to design the moodle course in however way they want: It integrates SCORM packages, documents, videos, links, quiz, different grading systems (average/individual) and the grade history of the students on the platform. The teacher also has the flexibility to program when to make one lesson visible (by presetting the time and date), when to close assignment submission past deadline automatically, or to create specific forums and events. One can use moodle to run a class or to act as a learning repertoire. There is also the option to add a chat room for a particular lesson. What I also appreciate is the feature to monitor course participation and activity log report of students. By including keys to the lessons, we can control who we give access to the contents on the forum. Thus it can either be open contents or private. The power lies in the hands of the administrator.

Puntos en contra: The chat feature should be an in-built feature rather than a pop-out screen available only when the administrator adds it as part of a lesson.

Puntos a favor: There are lots and lots of resources for help. Almost every page on the Moodle site has a link at the bottom of it taking you to the specific documentation of what you are working with. Moodle has a huge community of worldwide users that are extremely responsive to user forums, so help is literally a couple of clicks away. Moodle is easy to figure out, even if you have never used and LMS. The site I currently administrate is at http://classes.ala.org. As you land on the homepage, you will see the list of our different divisions who offer online courses. We do this using the categories feature, allowing each of our separate divisions to be represented on the single ALA site. What you might also notice is that the login for the site is a convenient eyebrow link. If you click it, there are a variety of options for setting up your own guest credentials in addition to signing in with your official credentials granted by one of the administrators. Most user issues are simple to troubleshoot. Moodle's no nonsense layout and intuitive interaction makes it pretty straightforward to figure out user issues. Error messages tell you specifically what a problem is in plain English (or whatever language you want to set up). Most user problems are rights related in the system. Moodle allows you to restore previous courses into new courses. The backup and restore feature pretty much does everything for you. Take out the user data from a backup and you can restore the previous version of a course into a brand new course with very little downtime.

Puntos en contra: Version 1.9 requires an older version of Java running in order to use the wysiwyg html editor (something that comes in handy for the introduction to the course and each section/Topic for the course) -- a version of Java is required, that if you are on Windows 7, has security issues that your Network Admin is probably blocking. The workaround not having an html editor is to open your web content editor (we have Drupal and Dreamweaver) and then paste the code into the setting fields. It is not difficult to do, just inconvenient. I am sure the current version 2.6 has this capability and more that we are waiting to upgrade to.
You have to dig a bit to get to the settings and permissions for specific activities. For example, a common user issue is with Student access to a forum. It is not obvious that some forums are specifically for teacher announcements (meaning that students aren't able to respond, just read the announcements). By the time I get issue, the course creator has a dozen or so forums setup with participants already subscribed, which means that it is easier for me to go into each forum and override the native rights. When you have scores of courses running each containing a dozen or more forums that each need to have permissions touched, it is a lot of work from the admin point of view. The lighter side is that with the proper training, or sandbox playing, creators can discover this nuance before its' too late.
The native chat activity doesn't really work in version 1.9. We use FlashChat by Host123 when our course leaders need a course chat room.
In version 1.9, there is not a lot of wiggle room in changing the look and feel of the courses. You can add, subtract and move blocks around, you can assign a theme, but it is not the most modern look and feel.