How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Walter Byrd -
Number of replies: 8

I am considering Moodle for a paid online training site. I am also considering WordPress and Drupal. From what little I have seen, Moodle seems to be the best choice. But I have some concerns.

1) I am iffy about being able to monatize a Moodle site. I know there is a paypal plugin for Moodle. But what about subscriptions? What about credit cards? 

2) Is this site made with Moodle? If not, why not?

3) I am reading some harsh stuff about Moodle. Is it any cause for concern?

80% of people on this site hate Moodle: http://amplicate.com/hate/moodle

I am also reading a lot about performance issues, especially with recent releases of Moodle. 

4) A lot of people post that: "anything you can do with Moodle can be done with WordPress, or Drupal." I think that is probably true. But, from my experience so far, getting WP to act like an LMS is huge PITA. WP seems to be very centered around blogging. Using WP for an LMS feels like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Maybe I'm too impatient with WP? Also, worthwhile plugins in WP cost money, and sometimes even those are not worthwhile. 

5) Mobile is important to me. WP does have decent some decent mobile themes. How would you rate Moodle for mobiles?

6) Does the Moodle flashcard plugin work with newer versions of Moodle?

7) One of my great frustrations with Drupal was: this module does not work with that version of Drupal and that module does not work with this version of Drupal. Sadly, Moodle seems to have the same problem. Or maybe I have misunderstood?

That's all I can think of for now. Thanks for reading. 

 

 

 

 

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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

Mmm... I'm gonna watch this thread.

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Derek Chirnside -

Matt, I had exactly the same response.  

Walter, from your other post: "I am finding it a little difficult to setup WP for an LMS" - that is because WP is a blog, it's like trying to use tables in a wordprocessor for a spreadsheet.  Drupal is a CMS.  Both Drupal and WP have plugins to provide a little bit of LMS functionality, but their primary function is not LMSing.

You have a lot of misinformation in your post.  Don't believe random and anonymous "somebody" unless they actually know what they are talking about.

-Derek

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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

http://amplicate.com/ looks like an amusing site to pass the time, but I am not sure I would trust it for reliable information. You also need to calibrate against the competitors: http://amplicate.com/software/12376-top-e-learning-platforms/

On to the more serious questions:

2) This site is a mixture of Moodle (e.g. these forums) and other more specialised tools, like tracker.moodle.org and git.moodle.org. The intersting one is docs.moodle.org, which uses Mediawiki, not the Moodle wiki. The Moodle wiki is designed for a small wiki activity within a course. The Moodle docs wiki is a huge site, which needs the extra organisation tools that mediawiki provides.

3) The perforamance issues are fixable. Indeed, how we have started working on it, a lot of them have been, or are being, fixed MDL-39443. Many sites run Moodle with good performance.

4) Anything you can do in Moodle can be done in Drupal or Wordpress. Similarly, you could do it all by starting from scratch and building your own custom system in PHP (or any other language) but that is going to be a lot of work. If you want to teach online, then using a tool that was built to support teaching online is probably going to turn out easiest in the long run. (And I don't believe there is anythign for Drupal that can do everything that Moodle's quiz module can do.)

7) The Moodle plugins directory clearly documents which add-ons work with with versions of Moodle. Of course, it takes time after a release like Moodle 2.5 for all add-on maintainers to test their plugins and update the database entry. Normally, plugins that works in Moodle 2.x just work in Moodle 2.x+1 without changes, but this needs to be tested.

Sorry, I can't really help you with the other ones.

I will just comment that one approach people sometimes take is to put another system in front of Moodle. For example, if you have complex payment requriements that you know how to implement in some other system, then you could use that other system as a front-end to your site. Users enrol and pay there, and then you use a single-sign-on system, and an enrolment plugin, so that when they click the link to their course, they end up in Moodle for the actual teaching and learning. Look up authentication and enrolment plugins in the docs.

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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Walter Byrd -

 

Very informative. Thank you.

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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Bob Neuner -

I have the same problem with trying to "monetize" potential training site. Setting up PayPal is easy, but many want to pay with credit or debit. I use QuickBooks Merchant Services for processing in the office, but there is no way I can accept any volume.

There is a plugin, but I don't see how subscription can be processed. Besides, it is very expensive, $50/mo and $0.25 per transaction. Very costly for short $2 or $3 courses.

I looked at "ZenCart" as a front end, but I an certainly not a "mega-programmer" and don't feel comfortable playing with money. One mistake and it would be a nightmare. I know that there is a nursing school in BC that uses this combination, but I can't get them to respond to my emails to let me know how it was done.

By the way, I think Moodle is the best as a LMS. I just wish upgrading was easier, and there were fewer on them.

I'll be following this closely. I am about to "go-live" with PayPal, but would like to ad other credit options.

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In reply to Bob Neuner

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Bob,

Paypal accepts credit and debit card papyments. I think all you need to do is get verified as a merchant account holder.

I've heard bad things about Paypal though, that they can be tardy in crediting funds to merchants and sometimes put amounts of money "on hold" for reasons that they're unwilling to disclose detailed information about.

Also, Paypal's disputes resolution service doesn't respect the corresponding trading laws where the transactions take place, leaving customers and traders in a dog-eat-dog legal no man's land.

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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Antonello Lobianco -

My 2 cents: I think the most important aspect in comparing Drupal and Moodle is to remember that the first one is a generic CMS very close to be a web framework, the second one is a specialised learning management system.

It's true you can mimic most of Moodle with Drupal, but at cost of using ton of modules (the first in my mind Organic groups, webform, some content access module, views, rules..) and personalisation.. let's say it's a ~2-3 years/man job of a proficient drupal developer.

On the other hand, Moodle is a ready-to use solution BUT it doesn't have almost anything of user management other than the courses.. most (all?) large organisations that use Moodle they use it to deliver the courses but, for example, the enrolling of users to courses or the assignment of credits is done toward external back-office tools and then integrated in Moodle e.g. using LDAP. In your case, you can set paypal to pay for courses but you can't set it to pay for individual activities.

So the best solution is to just use both: use the flexibility of Drupal to manage the users, if you need add a e-commerce store to deliver access to the courses rights, etc and then use Moodle to deliver the individual courses.

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In reply to Antonello Lobianco

Re: How would you rate Moodle against Drupal or WordPress?

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Antonello,

Good points; a generic CMS like Wordpress, Joomla, or Drupal is going to take a tonne of work to make it anywhere near as useful as an LMS. Also think about much re-inventing the wheel you'd have to do. With a mature LMS, you've already thousands of users trying to do all kinds of different things with it and, with a good developer team and contributors, there's more likely to be some really coherent, practical, and useful features that you're unlikely to think of if you starting from a CMS and adapting it.

That said, I've been playing around with a collaborative platform built on Drupal (cue jokes about Drupal's core code), called OpenAtrium: http://openatrium.com/#!/ Once you get used to the pretentious naming (e.g. pages are called "spaces") it has some interesting and potentially useful features for collaborative learning. I like the amount of autonomy and control you can hand over to participants to form groups, start their own projects, control access, keep track of what others are doing, etc. in particular.  Of course, it's not an LMS and not what most people have in mind when they think of online courses. However, if you want to do some strongly social constructivist oriented learning and teaching, I think it's certainly worth considering.

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