Why I’m Giving Up On Moodle

Moodle is great. There, you Moodle fans out there, I’ll give you that- It’s a great platform, full of options and customizability, even some ecommerce potential. I’m developing pay-to-learn sites and am working on a workable platform. But I’m giving up on using Moodle, and here’s why: no control over the user’s progression thru a course. Moodle was designed from the outset to allow students to peruse a course in a non-linear fashion- it’s almost a religious belief with the Moodle-ers on the forums.

One poor Moodle forum newbie posted a message with his desire that he be able to control a user’s linear path through a Moodle course. He was designing courses for a state-sponsored certification exam, and the state agencies want to see an online course where access to Topic B is not possible without first successfully completing Topic A. Not exactly on the cutting edge of current education wisdom, but that is just the way it is.

Our hapless forum newbie was given a set of responses from the Moodle gurus laced with the scorn normally reserved for a Windows user posting a Perl problem on PerlMonks.com. One guru compared a linear learning path to a ‘mindless learning rat maze’. Ugh. So goes the entreprenuer’s voyages into the world of open source. If you want to use open source products for profit, be ready to swim on your own.

There are hacks available to implement ‘content locking’ in Moodle - but the hacks are not supported modules, and tend to break with each Moodle update. I never could get the hack to work with SCORM modules at all.

The other reason we are not going to use Moodle for our learning sites is the spotty support of SCORM offered by Moodle. With Moodle, your only real option if you want to use SCORM with any control over access to content is to post your course as one, big-ass SCO file. Not a workable solution.

In the coming weeks I’ll be reporting on our experiences with Claroline, another open-source learning package. It has a neat feature called ‘Learning Paths’ that can implement locks - as well as very easy and trouble-free SCORM support.