Moodle for selling courses online?

Moodle for selling courses online?

by Walter Byrd -
Number of replies: 11

I am looking for something to sell courses online.

I do not know that much about Moodle. Here is my understanding. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Pros:

  • Moodle is popular LMS
  • Moode has staying power
  • Moodle has lots of developers
  • Moodle is free and will stay free
  • Moodle designed as an LMS from the beginning, not just an LMS plugin.

Cons:

  • Moodle is really designed for K-12.
  • Moodle has a lot of stuff online course sellers don't need.
  • Moodle may be lacking some of the stuff that online course sellers do need. 
  • Moodle is not really designed for ecommerce.
  • Moodle's methods of accepting payments for courses, may be somewhat lacking.
  • Moodle has a paypal plugin, but what about credit cards?
  • Moodle paypal plugin only allows you to sell by the course, not by the month, or whatever. 
  • Moodle has a reputation for being somewhat slow and clunky. Okay for K-12, maybe not okay for commercial use.

Not sure about Moodle mobile app, or Moodle responsive themes. These days, I think mobile is very important. 

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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

By K-12 (Americanism sad ) you effectively mean "schools", yes?  Reputation of being slow and clunky with whom? Only if you don't run it on adequate hardware!

No... Moodle is massively used for commercial training, in huge universities and for all most anything you can think of.

What Moodle doesn't come rolled up with is eCommerce. The most effective solution is to use a proper eCommerce package and hook it together with Moodle. Popular solutions include WooCommerce + Moodle but there are others. Many (most?) of these are commercial developments in some way and/or you may need custom development to achieve exactly what you need.

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Walter Byrd -

> The most effective solution is to use a proper eCommerce package and hook it together with Moodle. Popular solutions include WooCommerce + Moodle but there are others. 

That means you a need Wordpress frontend. That means taking something that is already bordering on too big and complicated, and making it even bigger, and more complicated.  I prefer not to have things "hooked together."

IMO: it's a shame Moodle does not have a better ecommerce plugin. There seems to be a lot of interest in using Moodle for commercial purposes. But the lack of native support makes this much more difficult. 

Or, maybe people want to use Moodle in an inappropriate way.


> Reputation of being slow and clunky with whom?

Are you kidding? It's all over this forum. I see lots of posts wishing by people wishing Moodle was more like Canvas, or some other, more modern, LMS.

The last time I tried Moodle was Moodle 2.7. I did not think it was terrible, but could have been better. 



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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Hello. I noticed there is an enrolment plugin for Classic Pay https://moodle.org/plugins/view/enrol_classicpay which takes many different types of payment. (I haven't used it but I thought I would mention it as I just found it)


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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by RABIAH HOGANS -

Thanks Mrs. Cooch for the heads up Im new to this exploration from the ga virtual school of online learning for teacher. Your words are most appreciated.

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In reply to RABIAH HOGANS

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by RABIAH HOGANS -

This sight is awesome and is really geared towards schools in general. Im new to this exploration from the ga virtual school of online learning for teacher. Great to have fulfilled a portion of this quest.

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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Moodle is really designed for K-12.

It was not designed for schools nor is it particularly focused on schools. It was designed for learners and teachers.  As examples of use in the HE sector both Cambridge University and the UK Open University (around 250,000 enrolled students) use Moodle. 

I recommend Howards comments, he really knows what he is talking about.

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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

I'm sorry - I don't want to be either defensive or argumentative - but your remarks about 'slow and clunky' are nonsense. 

Admittedly, 'clunky' is in the eye of the beholder (although I don't think it is) but you are definitely not having 'slow'. A Moodle site properly set up by somebody who knows what they are doing (it's a server application remember, which requires some specific skills to get right in a production environment) can achieve page load times in low tenths of a second. Is that what you call slow?

Canvas seem to have a very considerable marketing budget and it has its plus points but I don't see that it does anything better than Moodle. However, if you like Canvas better then use Canvas.

While I agree that Moodle + eCommerce could be better served, my experience is that it suffers from "the Devil is in the Detail". Are you advocating a fully fledged eCommerce plugin for Moodle? That really contravenes your requirement of not ending up with something rather unwieldy. However, you are obviously very welcome to sponsor the development of one. 

I tend towards the Unix idea that you do one thing and do it well. I used WooCommerce as an example but there are many mature eCommerce packages that are very good. So you end up with a great eCommerce package and a great VLE (Moodle) and you need to write the relatively simple bit in the middle. Then you contribute it to the community and everybody is happy wink

If you want to get a consultant to simply sort this for you then I know for a fact that a number of Moodle Partners offer off the shelf solutions for Moodle plus eCommerce. 

You've been a long time choosing your solution wink
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=228223

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Walter Byrd -


> You've been a long time choosing your solution

Yep,  I dropped the ball on this project a long time ago, now I'm trying to pick it back up.

Thank for the link to my old post, I didn't know how to find it. 


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In reply to Walter Byrd

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Marcus Green -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

There is a link in your Moodle profile that allows you to scroll through your previous posts. 

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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Moodle for selling courses online?

by Robert Brenstein -
If you see Moodle clunky as delivered, it is up to you to spruce it up with an alternative theme and whatever.

May be Totara be a product for you -- Moodle variation geared for corporate world.

Also, have you seen this thread?
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=314373
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