Comparisons and advocacy

Moodle can do whatever your client needs it to do providing the right plugins and permissions are activated. Being Open Source, Moodle is flexible enough to allow a PHP developer to create any necessary modifications.

For some of the tools asked about, like the countdown timer, I don't really know, but I suggest any skilled PHP developer could create the plugin required to add that kind of functionality. (I have never heard of one being available, but that does not mean it isn't, I have never had a requirement for one so never bothered looking.) 

Most of the questions asked around courses and testing, an out of the box Moodle already has available, but you need a good understanding of Moodle to be able to properly activate utilise the tools in the precise way asked about,  

There are some limitations though, e.g. Q8, We differentiate between "classes" and "Courses" in a school setting. I have only used individual classes of students taught by individual teachers and enrolled individual students in subject courses. In the kind of set up you are asking about, I don't know anybody doing it that way, but it makes a lot of sense in a lot of organizations to do it like that. I suggest the same PHP developer could create a set of SQL statements and an additional interface page to automate the enrollment processes easily. A cascading enrollment/unenrollment would be, I suspect, a fairly simple thing using the database providing that your course structures are fully developed and fixed.      

Fee paying and non-fee paying elements are already available, There was a discussion on this years ago and there is a way for it to be done, but I did not really follow the discussion so don't know how it was achieved. I think it ended up being something in the actual Moodle role assignment process rather than anything else, that was considered simplest, from memory. 

Much of what you ask for is already available, and Moodle is flexible enough for you to do just about everything else you need. 

I do not know of any LMS that does what you ask, but some, like the commercial products, become horrendously expensive to add this kind of sophisticated functionality. That expense, btw, increases as you update your core program. Moodle is probably the most accessible tool in this regard, plus the added benefit of a large development community to defray some of those costs and speed up the development process.  

Sandy, you are more likely to get more answers if you keep to one (or two at most) questions per post and tell us what you have found out so far. 

To take your questions in order:

Q1 Moodle does have an automatic session timeout that can be set.

Q2 Quizzes in Moodle can be timed affairs with the timer reaching zero and the student data being automatically submitted. Once submitted the activity can be counted as completed and with conditional access setups completed items could be made invisible.

Q3 As a Moodle admin the reports system is very good, practically every action taken by a user is logged and any admin can access these logs to see times dates. In the case of course data this is accessible by the "teacher" they can see when a student logged in, what they viewed and whether they uploaded any assignment work.

Q4 There are plugin reports that show totaled times for students including when they were actually active and not just sitting looking at the page.

Q5 Quizzes log questions missed, answered incorrectly, students can flag a question to return to it. Some quizzes can even build on previous attempts so if you allow multiple attempts at a quiz subsequent attempts to the first will contain correct answers already. Usually such multiple attempts incur a penalty on scores because a student who answers a question on the first pass should get a better score than one who's had a chance to go back to the textbook and look it up.

Q6 Not entirely sure if a course can be duplicated as such. It can certainly be backed up without user data and then restored as a new course. I've never had to try thankfully.

Q7 See Q5 you can allow multiple attempts at a quiz and questions answered incorrectly are flagged red, correctly green and unanswered left white in a navigation panel at the top right of the quiz itself. The navigation panel however is only visible to the student while they are taking part in a quiz.

Q8 Actually to me your Q8 configuration sounds like the cohorts setup moodle utilizes. As long as the class list can be given to a course or moodle admin prior to the course being used, the necessary user accounts can be setup and then corralled into a cohort, the cohort is then attached to the course. I've done this for teachers at the school I work at, I manually create a user account and can configure the manual account with whatever permissions are required e.g. setup a teacher. We then use ldap authentication and when the staff member actually logs in their rights/permissions are already in place. Cohorts would also allow you to limit who can access a course. In effect if their name's not on the list they're not coming in!

Q9 Not sure about that students can certainly search courses, then again there might a plugin available.

Q10 I'm not sure whether you can have an agency login as such. But a course in Moodle is certainly capable of supporting a group structure where the agencies are created as the groups, students are emailed login details with an enrolment key that they supply when they try to access the course. The key they use then automatically determines the group they join. Whether this process would bypass payment methods I don't know, we don't use payment based systems in a school. Of course if the class list is available before hand then as for Q8 the groups could be setup beforehand, in this case they would login and go straight into the course as they would count as already enrolled.

Hope this is of some help to you I've been using Moodle now for about 12 years and believe me I'm still learning!

John Gifford