Moodle Review

The course management feature, and the community plug-in that comes with it, is most helpful.

The product allows the organization to have a cost effective solution to track the training progress of 2000 staff members. At the same time, it allows a collaborative environment between trainee and trainer.

I've used it for one year and four months.

The use of Moodle with Bitnami’s LAMP stack has been very smooth, and it has easy support and maintenance.

We chose to deploy after a couple of minor releases, thus we were careful in our version choice, and that has resulted in a very stable product.

We can easily search for any issues and resolutions from the web, in particular the Moodle website, to resolve all our technical issues. I would say that a very effective self service environment exists to support Moodle.

We were using a commercial product, a SaaS model. However, the need to quickly deploy a solution to five global service centers in three different regions was too costly, and too time consuming, for the initial deployment assessment.

Using Bitnami’s LAMP stack with Moodle helped simplify the deployment, and made it very simple and straightforward

Because of the readily available information, and knowledge from the Moodle website, about the deployment architecture design, we were able to deploy the solution fully in house within a very tight time line . We were able to a very small, and compact team of five members.

We see, and estimated, a 60% productivity improvement in managing trainee learning progress. In addition, with the low cost of setup and ownership, the organization is able to save on capital expenditure.

The original hardware cost is about US$10,000 for setting up the virtualized environment. The implementation cost was about 100 man days for the five global centers. Day to day running costs are pretty negligible as the platform has been stable, and has run with no major incidents since deployment.

We evaluated the options of going with the group solution (SaaS model), or to develop in house. Neither option was chosen, either because the cost was high or the time taken to deploy it would be too long.

Be open minded about open source solutions. Be clear about the requirements, and needs of your organization. Last, but not least, start small but be aggressive on the time-line, and preferably take an agile project approach.