Comparisons and advocacy

Mike.

You can upload most SCORM courses into moodle.  I don't know about Lectora.

You can set up payment for each course, or work with something like AMember to expand that ability.

You can set up Master courses with prerequisites and accomplish your goal of the curriculum.

There are a number of free videos on YouTube, and through links here that will tell what Moodle 2.0 will do.

You can install instances of moodle in different folders on a server, but I don't really think that is usually the best way to do it.  You have a lot of freedom with categories, menus in the new templates that might accomplish the same thing.

We can't answer whether you should stay or not, but there are a number of comparisons between Moodle and other LMS's on the web.  If you are using a wimpy LMS, you should probably switch.  If you are on BlackBoard, you would save a lot of money, but Moodle may or may not meet your needs.

> Can I upload courses from Lectora that have been published to SCORM?

Just try it out: http://demo.moodle.net/

> Is there shopping cart ability so that a student must pay for the course before they can access it?

Yes, Moodle has built-in option to pay through PayPal and it is possible to connect to other payment systems with additional plugins.

> Can I set up a curriculum of several courses and can then have prerequisits within the curriculum?

A qualified yes. Qualified because I don't know what exactly you mean. Moodle has conditional access to activities and various ways of enrollment. Worst comes to worst, you may hire someone to write a custom plugin that does what you need.

> Can I put Moodle on the server several times so that each school has their own location - they don't have to sort through a number of departments to find the course?

Yes. It is also possible to use the same codebase for all instances, but this requires more technical know-how.

> How do I find what Moodlecan do? I currently have a different LMS that is not doing what I want and I need to know if Moodle will do a number of the things the old one will plus other functions I don't have access to right now.

Check out the demo site for hands-on experience. Check out documentation at http://docs.moodle.org. Check out moodle.org forums. Check out the repository of Moodle plugins at http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?id=6009 Check out videos on YouTubes and other online resources. Check out Moodle books.

> Should I stay where I am or do I dare fenture forth into open source software?

That you have to decide yourself. As Ray wrote, there are quite a few comparisons to other LMSs, formal and semi-formal studies from various institutions which were considering to switch to Moodle. Most did. Just Google for them. Check also the "Comparisons and Advocacy" forum at http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=2784 .