Moodle: The Corporate Reality Uncovered
Cirencester (UK), July 2012 - The popularity of Moodle as an academic learning platform is migrating into the corporate market. But built originally for an academic audience and learning model, what's the reality of Moodle's usage and suitability for corporate learning?
"Insights into Corporate Moodle", a new report by Elearnity, exposes the reality of how Moodle is being used in corporate organisations and analyses the implications for corporate adopters.
Elearnity's research is based on in-depth discussions with corporate Moodle customers, comments by vendors focusing on the corporate market, and an interview with Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas. The research from Elearnity, examines the key limitations of Moodle when used as a corporate learning-management system (LMS) and how it is being adapted by some vendors to address those issues.
"Moodle has been increasingly touted as a corporate LMS" explains Adrian Jones, Principal Analyst of Elearnity. "We feel it's important to get beyond the hype and help organisations truly understand what Moodle can and can't do for them in reality."
Having been heavily adopted in the academic community, the Moodle user base stands at over 57 million worldwide. But adoption within corporate organisations has been slower, and the research highlights key limitations in a corporate setting as an enterprise-wide solution.
Jones continues, "The most common corporate use of Moodle still remains as a low-cost platform to launch and track eLearning content, not as a true LMS. There is, however, a significant potential for it to be extended with more corporate LMS features, leading to the growth of -˜hybrid Moodle' solutions such as Totara or Joule."
Jones explains, "The key drivers for corporate adoption of Moodle are often the lack of budget or time to deploy an enterprise LMS and the associated perception that because it's open source, it comes for free. This is not the case, however, and our research found the costs involved in implementing Moodle are typically higher than expected when you add in corporate functionality and service levels."
The research also explores the Moodle supply chain and the challenges involved for end-user organisations when implementing it as a solution. In addition, there is an in-depth case study that features the Open University where Moodle is used to support over 200,000 learners.
