Item: Moodle
Rating: 7
Author: Pierre Tassel

Overall Satisfaction with Moodle

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

As a teaching assistant at the university, I found Moodle to be an invaluable tool for facilitating communication with students, distributing and collecting class materials, and supporting remote teaching through its “Classroom” feature. We also integrated CodeRunner for automatic exercise correction in Java, this feature was used for the weekly assignments and it proved particularly useful for secure exam sessions. Moodle’s comprehensive features significantly enhanced our teaching and administrative efficiency in such a setting when we have to collect hundreds of assignments each week and grade them.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Group students
File uploads including cutoff date
Forum
Grading

Cons

Classroom is not 100% reliable
Copying content from one semester to the other was not straightforward
Coderunner is not very intuitive, building exercises can be tricky sometimes
Outdated UI, especially on Mobile
Difficult to find specific settings, online documentation is sparse

Return on Investment

All content in one place
Keep track of previous years material
Improved communication between students and with staff
Better feedback on homework upload for students

Alternatives Considered

Google Classroom

Compared to Google Classroom, Moodle is more flexible and more comprehensive. But the interface is a bit outdated and not very mobile-friendly. Additionally, Google Classroom has nice integration with other Google's workspace tools. Google lack tools such as CodeRunner to be used efficiently in a Computer Science course settings and using an hybrid solution is never ideal.

Key Insights

Do you think Moodle delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Moodle's feature set?

Yes

Did Moodle live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Moodle go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Moodle again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, Slack

Likelihood to Recommend

Moodle excels at creating student groups for managing grades and sharing documents. However, for remote teaching, its “Classroom” feature falls short, particularly with unreliable recording functionality. I prefer Google Meet that also propose option such as automatic transcription of the recording.
Additionally, it lacks the capability for students to ask questions anonymously during class, I had to use PigeonHole for such feature.

Moodle Feature Ratings

Comments

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Comprehensive and powerful tool, needs UX improvements