Moodle Doodle & White Bread

I’ve had about a week to settle back in after giving a presentation at Training 2009 on the open source LCMS, Moodle. As I mentioned last week, I had a packed audience but received mixed reviews. We have been utilizing Moodle for over two years for several client projects. The Moodle pedigree stems purely from higher education, so it was not designed for corporate use as a generic LMS. Moodle.org seems to have little interest in adapting to fit the needs of companies that want to train thousands of employees using hundreds of courses (see threaded discussions on the site-wide grouping feature). Nevertheless, there are many specific corporate training initiatives that Moodle is perfect for. Click here for my presentation.

Clark Aldrich, the private-sector guru for immersive learning simulations, has compared books to white bread in his latest Blog post. “The business model behind linear content is becoming increasingly strained.” These are interesting comments from a person who has two books coming out. We accept them because Clark spends his time designing immersive simulations as well as writing traditional books.

While it's true that Moodle originated in a higher education environment, it is not true that Moodle isn't suitable or used much by corporate. In fact, many thousands of companies are using Moodle, including some of the largest. Moodle is simply a platform for delivery of online learning and is not slanted toward any particular form of pedagogy. That is supports social learning very well simply reflects considerations made by the developer during its design. It supports all types of pedagogy, and has support for all standards commonly used in the corporate learning environment. Moodle is actually on several IMS committee's for emerging learning standards. Lastly, Aldrich has simply stated the obvious, on everyone's mind for quite some time. That is, anyone who thinks an LMS is simply a SCORM player and that online instructional design should continue to resemble PowerPoint slide shows, is still living in the 20th century.