Moodle in Corporate Education

Moodle in Corporate Education

by Chris Luther -
Number of replies: 15

First off, Martin, thank you for your work with Moodle.  It seems to be a very rich learning environment. 

 

I am an instructional developer working at an enterprise software company in Austin, Texas.  Currently I am experimenting with using Moodle in a corporate environment, but I think for slightly different reasons than Moodle's core audience of academic educators. 

 

In an entrepreneurial environment knowledge moves at a very fast pace.  Here, software products are developed, sold and pushed out the door rapidly. Early on this company developed a culture where when an individual deployment consultant or a sales engineer needed to know something they would walk over to the developer's cube and ask the question.  Documentation?  Training?  They didn't see the need.  The attitude was the code was the documentation and anyone who works here should smart enough to figure it out.

 

Maybe this worked when we were a company of 50 people, but it does not work now that we are a company of more than 300 people spread out over four continents.  Today the company sees value in repeatable processes, efficiency in communication, and shared corporate knowledge.  

 

I have started a pilot project to use Moodle internally to accomplish the following:

  • Accelerate the training of our internal employees on new product releases.
  • Use Moodle to accelerate the development of external training materials.

 

At Motive, we have a formal instructional design process that is divided into distinct "plan", "commit", "design",  "research", "development", and "deployment" phases.  With this research project I am hoping to use Moodle to compress the "research" and "development" phases by more effectively harnessing the SME's discovery process.  For this reason I would be very interested in connecting with other individuals who are using Moodle to deliver training within corporate environments. 

 

Since there is the hope that this project will be successful my next worry will be deploying Moodle (or an alternative platform) across the enterprise.  For this reason I would be interested in speaking with individuals who have experience using Moodle in large scale deployments. 

 

Thank you in advance,

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In reply to Chris Luther

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Ray Lawrence -

Hi Chris,

I just came across this post whilst looking for something else.

Hows your project going, I'd be really interested in an update if you have a moment or two? I'm not in education but in the commercial sector - although not using Moodle commercially.

Ray

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In reply to Chris Luther

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Robert Saari -

As an Instructional Technologist where I work, I deployed Moodle as our LMS.  At the time we were a company of ~3,000 employees in three cities accross the U.S.  Since July of 2005, with new contracts and a merger, the company has experienced tremendous growth and we now have ~5,000 employees in eight locations.  In addition to developing CBTs (Authorware rocks!), I built and maintain the training website and administer the server.

Initially, we were using a proprietary LMS created by a startup company.  While it was a good first effort, it had several bugs that were causing headaches for me.   The vendor was slow to respond with bug fixes (and sometimes completely unresponsive) and my boss got fed up with them and directed me to find a replacement LMS "NOW!"  That's how we wound up using moodle.

Anyway, we use Moodle primarily for our new-hire training, and since going live in July, 2005, more than 1,400 employees have participated in our blend of instructor-led and online training.  Peak number of individual users for a single day was 150.

As for the architecture, through the use of frames, Moodle blends in nicely with our internal training website.  Because we're strictly a Microsoft shop (oh, stop...I don't make those decisions - I just work here), I'm running Moodle on a Windows 2003 virtual server with IIS 6.0.  I split off the MySQL database to run on another Windows box. 

As far as performance is concerned, the biggest issue is loading the final exam.  When a class of 40 students all hit the exam at the same time, the server's processor spikes at 100%, and the memory drops like a rock (Increasing the memory and tweaking the pagefile settings helped improve this).  Because our CSO requires we use a secure server there are a few things that don't work quite right, but they're not Moodle related.  For example, the audio files we used to stream won't stream anymore (IIS security issues), and the Questionnaire results can no longer be exported to Excel (again, IIS security issues).

While I haven't been able to make the SCORM module work properly, overall, I'm pleased with what a success Moodle has been here (Kudos to all contributors!).  The reporting features it lacks are easily overcome by adding my own pages and/or ad-hoc queries, which I was not able to do with our proprietary LMS.

Long term, our HR department will be transitioning to one of those big name ERP solutions (not allowed to name them - we're in negotiations) that includes an LMS, so I.T. will probably force me to switch over.

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In reply to Robert Saari

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Michele Morgan -
How did you allow various dept managers, etc to view the training records for their employees?
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In reply to Michele Morgan

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Sue Elvins -
Obviously this is an old thread but still a good question. I'm curious to know the answer to the above question. Thanks!
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In reply to Sue Elvins

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Wen Hao Chuang -
This issue is being addressed in the new moodle 1.9 which is under development right now. For different department managers, the "roles" system should be helpful to assign different roles for different department managers. As for managing the outcome and the reporting issues, see here:

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Development:Outcomes#Outcomes_management_and_reporting

hope this helps, smile


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In reply to Michele Morgan

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by elearning edu -

Recently I was asked to setup Moodle based corporate training using the internal environment (100% M$ products -Win2k3, IIS6, MsSQL).  As suggested here they kept DB in a different server and used elearning authoring tools.  Their main requirement was to use the flash streaming video capturing the training from a studio environment and placing the content in moodle as SCORM compliant content for their members (3000 in numbers)

They had the peoplesoft HR training module and they wanted to add moodle training so that members from various departments will be able to access accoriding to their ID.  I know that they are yet to do this by integrating Moodle with people soft.

Right now they use Active directory and LDAP for scheduling the training programs

I had a tough time configring Moodle with IIS, PHP and MsSQL.  We are yet to get a smooth installation of Moodle in this environment.  Unless you achive a painless process of installation and integration, moodle will remain outside the corporate circle. The corporate will be cautious to go for Open Source  DB and web server.  They want moodle to converge with Microsoft products since they have already invested heavily and they can have the elearning framework at an affordable cost.

Nagarajan

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In reply to Robert Saari

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Kevin Moffitt -

I know this is an older thread but I am looking for assistance on using Moodle as an online registration system for a blend of both classroom training and E-learning. If anyone has experience using Moodle in this type of situation I would like to hear about the implementation and results. Thanks

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In reply to Kevin Moffitt

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Jeff Burge -

Hi Kevin,

I work for a National Health Service trust in London and use Moodle to manage our eLearning content and as an online registration system for our classroom sessions.

The classroom sessions are managed using the excellent Face to Face plugin, here, and staff can view the range of courses and available dates and sign up remotely. This works particularly well for us as we are dispersed across 76 sites and managing a paper based application process was something of an admin headache. In addition, some of the courses have restricted access and we can control enrollment centrally allowing only those for whom a courses is mandatory to attend.

The Face to Face plugin sends email notification to the individuals designated manager as well as the Learning & Development team and such has been the success that we have transferred all of our training activity to this system.

The results have been fantastic; feedback from staff is positive, training uptake has increased and the quality of the data is much improved over our legacy system. We have a workforce with a huge variety of IT literacy and even those with a self proclaimed fear of computers express how user friendly and simple the functionality of the system is.

Jeff

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In reply to Jeff Burge

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Gail Reiken Tuzman, Ed.D. -

It has been a few years since the last post here.  I would like to hear from anyone who is currently using moodle for corporate training. In particular, how you use it for registration and keeping records of completion. Thanks,

Gail

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In reply to Gail Reiken Tuzman, Ed.D.

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Daniel Wright -

Greetings Gail, I have worked with a US hospital over the past year to implement Moodle for corporate IT training purposes.  The hospital is interested in using Moodle for broader education and training purposes, but I really need to give them some good examples of corporations who are effectively using the system this way.  I would also like to find some good course libraries - courses that have already been developed for corporate settings to which they could subscribe.  

I don't see much in way of responses here...were you able to find some good examples?  I haven't had much luck so far in the Business Uses forums either, but still trying.  Happy to connect with you by phone sometime if you're interested in swapping stories and ideas.

Thanks,

Dan

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In reply to Daniel Wright

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Gail Reiken Tuzman, Ed.D. -

Sorry to say that I have not learned of any good examples.  I have played around in a moodle course to explore its capabilities for our needs.  I was able to use locking to set modules to become available only after a previous one was viewed or a quiz was passed.  I was able to configure a certificate as well.  What I would still need to do is be able to bring information from the DB specific to the user into the certificate and also to create, instead of a certificate, a letter in a typical letter format  with an image letterhead, signature and also information from the DB (person's address) and also the date they completed the training.

Then there are also the issues of managing automatic enrollment and providing transcripts for users and records of completion for supervisors and administrators. I would be very interested in knowing how businesses or institutions are handling those issues with moodle.

Gail Reiken Tuzman

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In reply to Gail Reiken Tuzman, Ed.D.

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Gavin Henrick -
Picture of Plugin developers

Regarding examples, there are not many public case studies. When I co-authored a book about Moodle for Business usage we specifically included a selection of interesting case studies on a range of organisations (corporate or government) - including some Stuart above.

It included case studies from - OpenText,  A&L Goodbody, AA Ireland, Aer Lingus, Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), Gulf Agency Company, ADAPT, Remote-Learner, Texas Association of School Boards and Raiffeisen International Fund Advisory.

This is a link to some of the reviews on the book, which you may find useful:

http://www.moodleforbusinessbook.com/blog/?page_id=50

 

That may be of some help.

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In reply to Gavin Henrick

Re: Moodle in Corporate Education

by Rob Scott -

Gavin-

I'm just beginning to build moodle for our company and after reading reviews of your book, I immediately ordered a copy via next day air from Amazon. I can't wait to ge my hands on it!

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