Moodle is a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), also known as a course management system, used by WIT to help support lecturers in their teaching and students in their learning.  Moodle provides areas where lecturers can upload course notes and information, and communicate online with students (e.g. set and collect student assignments, send out class emails, etc.).  

Moodle has an extensive range of features that can be used to facilitate a variety of pedagogies and approaches including distance and flexible learning; for example, quizzes can be used to support self-directed learning, discussions forums to support peer and group based learning, and adobe Connect to support virtual delivery of lecturers, etc.  WIT lecturers can use Moodle to complement and enhance face-to-face lectures by providing a central online location to access the learning resources and associated activities.  

Some typical features of Moodle are:

• Assignment submission
• Discussion forum
• Files download
• Grading
• Moodle instant messages
• Online calendar
• Online news and announcement (College and course level)
• Online quiz
• Wiki

Moodle's infrastructure supports many types of plugins including:

• activities (including word and math games)
• resource types
• question types (multiple choice, true and false, fill in the blank, etc.)
• data field types (for the database activity)
• graphical themes
• authentication methods (can require username and password accessibility)
• enrollment methods
• content filters

Moodle is the open source platform that lets you build the perfect education solution for your needs.

We’ve grown Moodle since 2001 as an open source platform for educators to develop and manage courses online.

Moodle is a modular system based on plugins, which are like lego blocks that you put together to build whatever you want.  There are plugins for different kinds of content, and plugins for all kinds of collaborative activities, which is where Moodle really shines.  As an example our Workshop plugin manages a full peer assessment process, so you can get hundreds of students accurately grading each other’s assignments (that can save you a lot of time!).  Add some tracking and reports and the ability to add more plugins from the community or even ones you write yourself, and you can build some pretty amazing education environments.

The Moodle project is run by Moodle HQ from Perth, Australia, but would not be what it is without a huge community of users.  Our community work together and help each other on moodle.org (itself a Moodle site), where they’ve taken Moodle’s founding principles of feedback and collaboration online and practice it in our Moodle forums, our wiki-based Moodle Documentation, our Moodle Tracker for bugs and new features, our course-sharing site Moodle.net, and our Moodle Translation portal (which means you can use Moodle in over 100 languages!).