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Moodle Goes Corporate (Oct 08)
By Sarah Fister Gale
Companies of all sizes have begun to embrace Moodle, an open- source learning management system
that can be downloaded free and operates with virtually every other training-related software system on
the market.
While many companies may be skeptical of the value of open-source or free downloadable software
systems, Moodle, a learning management system, is proving that high value doesn’t necessarily correlate
to high price. Moodle was created by a developer in Perth, Australia, and over the past several years has
developed an almost cult-like following. It currently has more than a half-million users and developers
who blog daily at Moodle.org about how they use it and how they can improve it. They also share best
practices from around the world.
While Moodle’s foundations are planted firmly in academic use, more and more of its users are coming
from the corporate world, and not just from startups. The software, which can be downloaded free onto
any computer and can scale from one to 200,000 users, is now being used in global organizations,
including Subaru and Cisco, as a platform for training and for building communities of knowledge to share
best practices and collect corporate information for future training programs.
"A year ago most companies using Moodle were in the smaller scale," says Jason Cole, author of the
book Using Moodle and chief learning officer for Remote-Learner, a Moodle hosting partner in Denver.
"Not anymore. Today there is an enormous range, from mom and pop shops to mega-companies using
Moodle to create and manage course content."
Subaru dealers bond via Moodle
Automotive manufacturer Subaru is one large company that has embraced the open-source tool for
training management. Darryl Draper, a national customer relationship and loyalty training manager for
Subaru of America in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, delivers and tracks customer service training courses for
more than 600 Subaru dealerships across the country using Moodle.
Face-to-face training in an industry where 300 percent turnover rates are not uncommon had become too
much for Draper, and Moodle offered an alternative. "There were some markets where as soon as I
finished training I’d have to go back again," she says. "It was all reactive. I had no time to develop a
strategic training plan."
Instead she opted to develop online course content and deliver it to dealers via the company’s intranet.
Subaru had been using another LMS package to track some course content, but it wasn’t flexible enough
to do what Draper needed. "I wanted robust training where dealers could collaborate," she says of her
quest to find a new e-learning management system.
Moodle, with its open-source platform, gave her that flexibility. Using the software, which she hosts
through Remote-Learner, she developed two versions of each course, giving users self-paced options
with content and tests, as well as developing interactive communities of practice within the Moodle
platform. In the communities, trainees have a place to study the course material while sharing ideas and
questions with other users.
"The dealers love the communities," she says. "They talk, and share information and develop best
practices. There are a lot of robust dialogs taking place in those forums."
Draper monitors the forums to make sure conversations stay on track and to collect questions and
responses that she thinks will be valuable to other users, which she stores in wikis or glossaries at a
separate internal Moodle site
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