Moodle is an open source web-based course management system that is used by organizations, schools, universities, and training companies globally to provide online learning and the online component of blended learning. It is the world's most widely used open source course management system.
Moodle has a large community that collaborates in both developing and using the application through the community forums at https://moodle.org/. Moodle HQ has a team of full-time core developers who work on the ongoing support and development of the application. There is a global network of certified Moodle service providers that financially support the Moodle HQ by providing commercial services to organizations who use Moodle.
Moodle was originally released in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas to help teachers take advantage of the online environment to create online courses. Since then, there have been regular releases, with releases coming out on average every 6 months. The project is led and coordinated by Martin at Moodle HQ in Perth, Australia.
Moodle has a modern and easy-to-use interface that works well on desktops and mobile devices.
Users get a customizable dashboard where they can display their course information, calendar, and messages and manage their personal files on the system. Users can manage their own profile to control the level of notifications that they receive from the system, including being able to have forum posts sent out in daily batches.
The course management of Moodle enable easy communication, collaboration, and content creation for teachers and students in addition to comprehensive assessment tools, including the online quiz tool. Teachers can simply create content in Moodle using the accessible text editor or upload files, learning objects, and multimedia into the Moodle course including embedding third-party content such as SlideShare, YouTube, and other social systems into the pages of the course.
Teachers can easily track students' progress through the course content and activities, and students can monitor their own progress, with an understanding of what is left to accomplish.
From an administration perspective, Moodle is very flexible. For example, it has many options available for user authentication and course enrolment due to the many plugins that are available. These offer organizations many approaches to manage how they integrate Moodle into their other systems.