4.10.2008

Why Moodle for Corporate?

This blog post is in response to a question asked of me (privately) here. Rather than respond only in private, I though a blog post would help other Moodlers.

Richard,
Would you mind sharing how you arrived at an open source solution as your best option; and how Moodle ended up as your top choice?

The answer is simple: there has not been a corporate vision for learning at my organization beyond the required/mandated learning for maintaining certifications and compliance with standards. We have an LMS for that purpose but we are not satisfied with it. It is hosted offsite and it is not easy to update (takes considerable time and money each time).

Then, we began to look at upgrading our entire hospital medical information system and realized that would require training for which our current LMS was not a suitable solution. We would either have to keep our existing LMS as well as deploy a new one for the new training, or look for a way to migrate our existing LMS courses into our new LMS.

I am a fan and user of Open Source Software, so I naturally looked to Moodle to solve this problem (especially since I have a background in education as a Technology Coordinator and Educator). Moodle appeared to have the features that we needed so we decided to go forward with a beta-test. Moodle met with approval from the VP's since it was "free" and our current commercial LMS wasn't meeting their expectations (they didn't see a reason to spend more on another LMS which might put us right back in the same situation). I am still in the process of creating that beta-test for approval. If it meets the stakeholder's expectations then I will proceed with creating more content and importing existing content, after migrating from a sandbox server to a production server.

One of the first things I hope to test soon is authentication with Active Directory. There's documentation on this here.

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