Moodle 1.7 review

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 9356K Developer: Martin Dougiamas

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Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages of Moodle over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy.

Moodle is Open Source software, which means you are free to download it, use it, modify it and even distribute it (under the terms of the GNU General Public License). Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Netware and any other system that supports PHP, including most webhost providers. Data is stored in a single database: MySQL and PostgreSQL are best supported, but it can also be used with Oracle, Access, Interbase, ODBC and others.

Moodle has 50 language packs, including: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and US versions), Finnish, French (France and Canada versions), German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Maori, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.

Here are some key features of "Moodle":
Overall design of Moodle
Site management
User management
Course management
Auto-linking
Mathematics notation
Media plugins
Multi-language content
An "Upload File" assignment
An "Offline" assignment
A "Repeating" chat with public session logs
A "Open" chat event
A Choice with anonymous results
A Choice with non-anonymous results
A Choice that allows you to update anytime
A Standard forum for general use
Each person posts one discussion
A single discussion
Teacher-Defined Glossary
Learner-Defined Glossary
A glossary of common terms
A graded journal

What's New in This Release:
The four big headline features are Roles (a complete new architecture for assigning people permissions), the XML database schema (which now supports a wider range of databases), a new admin interface (designed to make it much easier to find settings and configure Moodle properly), and the Unit testing framework (which allows developers to write unit tests that can be run as part of a system check to make sure Moodle code is performing as expected).