Well, now that our school has moodle fully-entrenched as a solid alternative to BB, and our IT folks are refusing to add any more sections to BB (it just won't scale anymore and we've got 7 servers on it) we are going down the path of investigating "open source LMS's" - I find this humorous since we've been using moodle for 2 years, and it's now fully integrated into our registration/semester rollovers, etc... - but I'm playing the game so that we can make it official once and for all that moodle is our platform of choice.
To that end, my homework is to come up with the "pros" of moodle. I refused to do the cons, as I'll leave that to others who will have to take some abuse from me (unless the cons are legit, of course).
So in a burst of Mt. Dew induced frenzy, I spit out the following list in about 15 minutes and submitted it to the more rational member of my team in the hopes she'd tidy it up. She didn't... but I'm hoping others out there have got some sort of similar list. I know that I can find scads of info on the doc site- but I'm looking for a big list of bullet points and not much more - so if you like this and can add to it, or have a better list to point me to- I'm all ears and eyes.
So, here's what I started with (in no particular order):
- Moodle has over 12,000 registered installations world-wide and has been adopted by the two large "open universities" in the UK and Canada.
- Moodle is open source - which means complete access to ALL code for modifications, troubleshooting, and customization. This means we can never be "held hostage" by a vendor, or limited as to what we do or how we do it with the software.
- Moodle's platform - PHP and mySQL running on Apache and Linux (LAMP for short- stands for Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP) is a proven, world-wide standard with a ready supply of software developers, hosting providers, and 3rd party tools to aid in customization, configuration, etc..
- very easy for teachers to edit anything in their course.
- very easy to fix bad test questions
- easy to bring in external content as individual files or as zipped folder from any source
- very easy to import test/quiz questions from a variety of formats
- lends itself to very student-centric view of a course - profiles and activity are very accessible to teacher and students
- faculty and student profiles are linked across all courses - update once and it applies to all locations.
- very active, supportive and enthusiastic world-wide community at moodle.org
- very active list of professional supporters and support organizations who will make modifications or consult as needed
- progressive in support of ADA, section 508, IMS, SCORM and numerous other standards- no marketing baloney to suggest compliance when things are not yet perfect (BB claims ADA compliance but is not)
- content creation is easy- so if we request it from publishers in moodle format, they'll likely oblige
- bringing in any kind of content (from CD or website) is straighforward, and uses a graphical web-based interface
- quizzes can be regraded to account for fixed questions - live, and on the fly.
- questions can be edited right from the preview or review (of a student quiz) view
- any html elements can easily be inserted into the course or a block.
- blocks easily moved up or down, right or left
- very flexible layout (1, 2, or 3 columns, weeks or topics, many blocks or few)
- calendar that shows course, user, and site events, and can filter on any of the three
- course hierarchy is flat- easy to find content without digging into folder after folder
- course labeling and item labelling is easy
- anything can be edited with one click to edit, and another to save changes
- one click makes entire course editable in a variety of ways
- versions are progressing very quickly, so that each edition addresses key items from the previous version, leading to great forward progress.
- global product- accounting for 70+ languages, upcoming unicode support, intrinsic support for language issues
- embedded mp3 support - play linked audio directly from browser with flash player
- very progressive activities incorporated - blogs, wikis, journals, workshops, etc... (see full list of activities)
- easy linking to directory (as opposed to file) for making large amounts of content quickly available (i.e. 17 presentations)
(note that this is not my example of quality list-making or moodle advocacy - but barring better info from others on these boards, it's likely sufficient for this particular task)