MOODLE: An Evaluation as an Learning Management System
Craig Ferguson
Zain Yousaf Ali
University of British Columbia
ETEC 565A: Learning Technologies: Selection, Design and Application
January 31, 2016
Situation
The MSH AIDS Centre is located in a residential neighbourhood near downtown Toronto and is a mix of hospital and residence for people living with HIV/AIDS. In addition to providing treatment and consultations, the Centre includes 24 fully-equipped private suites intended for both long and short-term care.
This combination of functions requires a diverse range of skills to run and maintain both the medical area and the living space. However, due to its relatively small size and modest budget, The MSH AIDS Centre employs one part-time maintenance worker who mainly focusses on custodial duties and small repairs. For larger or more specialized projects, the Centre relies on contractors, averaging about 50 individuals per year.
Due to the sensitive nature of the work, as well as the health and safety considerations around communicable diseases and working with a vulnerable population, all contractors working there are required to undergo training in privacy and confidentiality requirements, health and safety, and an orientation on working with marginalized people.
Currently this training is delivered in-person by a member of staff on an as-needed basis. While this training is mandated by the board of directors, there is no designated trainer on staff – instead, the training is usually done by whoever is available. This worsens the personnel shortage, is expensive, and could potentially lead to variations in training quality.
These problems are about to be exacerbated: the The MSH AIDS Centre is due to undergo seismic upgrades, and this opportunity will be used to renovate six of the suites. In addition to the disturbance the work will cause, it also means that dozens of new contractors and their employees will require access to the building. This influx of workers would break the current, already fragile, training system.
The board of directors has several members with teaching experience who are enthusiastic about online education, and for the reasons outlined above, it was decided at the last board meeting that the contractor training should be put online. To get started, the MSH AIDS Foundation released a modest lump sum of funding for development purposes. The board indicated that they viewed this course as a pilot program, and if it succeeds they would be willing to consider an expansion of services, along with the provision of a limited amount of continuing funding to meet operating costs, in the range of $10,000 per year.
As the MSH AIDS Foundation already employs a team of three people to update and maintain its website and social media, it was decided that this team would be responsible for the eLearning platform. The staff all have some experience with coding and web standards, although they are not experts.
It is hoped that after implementing this system, the learning process for contractors will be more efficient, standardized, traceable, easier to use and maintain, and be secure and private. It is also hoped that this investment in learning technology will allow the organization to explore the idea of providing more education and training to its staff, residents, and the larger community, maintaining the The MSH AIDS Centre‘s reputation for innovation and adding revenue potential, as outlined in a case study of a similar non-profit prepared by Lambda.
Analysis
To help meet these goals, based on their preliminary research into the desirable features of LMSs the board drew up a list of requirements for an LMS, summarized in table 1: (Note: because there is not much available research into the implementation of LMSs in non-academic settings, the Board relied on existing research into academic implementation, as well as Board member input, and industry documentation)
Table 1 – Organizational Requirements
| Affordable, Sustainable, Expandable | Support for file formats | Searchable Database Included | Hosted in Canada |
| While funds have been set aside for this project, money is always tight and the funding cycle is unreliable. The Dr. Peter Centre needs a solution that is cheap to set up and has low running costs. Additionally, it must be affordable to expand, as the board has plans for future uses of the platform. | Board members hope to deliver innovative and engaging training into the future. They want an LMS that has native support for most standards and file types. While the first course to be built will be simple, they expect that future courses will require increased interactivity and media. | A key feature of this new system is that it will keep track of all historical course completions. This database needs to be searchable, easily understandable, and powerful enough for the organization to base growth plans around it. | As a recipient of provincial funding, the Dr. Peter Centre is required to keep all data on clients within Canadian jurisdiction. Because the long-term vision of the LMS is to provide courses for clients, this must be taken into account in the early stages of planning.Klassen (2011) discusses the difficulty of achieving this in a British Columbian context. |
They considered four possibilities: Blackboard Connect, WordPress, Eliademy, and Moodle.
- Blackboard Connect was interesting because it’s ready out of the box, can be hosted locally, supports SCORM and other formats, and comes equipped with a database; however it was ruled out immediately due to the high operating cost – pricing is individualized, but research suggested that an implementation that met their needs would cost more than $15,000 per year to license, well above their budget.
- WordPress is an open platform that’s free to use in its base form but is intended for blogging or simple websites and does not come with a useful database or support for reporting and tracking on activities. Adding in the required features would necessitate the installation of an LMS plugin, or the implementation of a Learning Record Store and customized database, but the board had concerns about recurring license fees, the possible cessation of support for smaller plugins, and the potential for future growth. For these reasons WordPress was rejected.
- Eliademy, a cloud-hosted platform, was initially seen as being a good choice. Because cloud-based products have the cost of hosting built into the license and have no IT start-up costs, they’re often the most affordable solution (for example, Eliademy charges about $7 CDN per month plus about $1.45 CDN per student). Eliademy is also fully featured, with support for a variety of activity formats and comes with a database administration system. However, privacy law in British Columbia, as well as the Dr. Peter Centre’s own privacy policy forbids client data from leaving the country, which rules out Eliademy and most other cloud-based LMSs who have their data centres around the world. Research into Eliademy uncovered several Canadian solutions, but while there are some Canadian cloud-based LMSs, none were as fully featured or affordable as Eliademy.
- Moodle is open source and free to install and use. However, this means that there is little formal technical support available, and users must turn to forums for assistance. However, there are two certified Moodle webhosts in Canada that offer formal support for hosted Moodle implementations, one of which, Lambda, is in Vancouver. This supported solution is more expensive than self-hosting, but still less than half of Blackboard Connect’s yearly cost and well within budget. Moodle is also widely compatible with most standards, including legacy (but still widely used) formats like SCORM, and is built around a powerful database that can accommodate a nearly unlimited number of students, meaning it will be expandable going forward. Finally, by going with a Canadian webhost and support provider, they’ll be able to guarantee that all student data remains in the country, protected by Canadian law. For these reasons the board elected to go with Moodle hosted by Lambda.
Functional Requirements
Moodle was identified as meeting the organization’s non negotiable requirements around finance, technology, and the law, but the Dr. Peter Centre also had to consider whether Moodle met the functionality requirements of their program. These functionality requirements are drawn from the organization’s goals, outlined in the initial board meeting as noted in Section 1 (efficient, standardized, traceable, easy to use and maintain, secure and private). The results of this research are shown in table 2 (Column 4 has links to the relevant Moodle documentation):
Table 2- Functional Requirements
| Requirement | Function | Rationale | Can Moodle Do It? |
| More efficient | Allow users to self-register but require approval | Having a member of staff manually register each learner would negate the efficiency gains. However, the system must be secure and private, with no unauthorized access. | Yes |
| Can run multiple courses at once, with different course lists | Future expansion is a priority, and the board expects more courses. | Yes | |
| Easier to use and maintain | Maintains searchable database of all past users | To quickly determine who has completed the training and who hasn’t staff must be able to quickly search records. | Yes |
| Can be updated easily | Staff are not yet experts but should be able to quickly edit and update content, preferably in a visual way. | Yes | |
| Secure and private | Can internally host content | The organization wants to keep their content not just in Canada but ideally under their direct control in order to maintain privacy. | Yes |
| Can hide user lists and limit access | Because they serve vulnerable people, all data must be kept confidential. | Yes | |
| More traceable | Tracks user performance and engagement | For reasons of compliance, as well as health, safety, and security, learners must demonstrate understanding of course material in a way that can be measured. | Yes |
| Can automatically produce certificates | Automating the system is important and freeing up personnel time is a motivation for going online. | Yes | |
| More standardized | Every user receives the same course content and is assessed on the same criteria | The current system allows for too much individual variation. The organization wants every contractor to have the same information and examination. | Yes, this is true of all LMSs |
Impact on Learning
The value of online learning for training, in terms of cost to the organization and convenience for the learners, is indisputable and there is no reason to think the The MSH AIDS Centre would not benefit from online training in terms of increased standardization, more automatic grading, more scope to update content in a systematic and ongoing way (Bates & Sangra, 2010 p.167).
However while online environments are excellent for compliance training, in this case for privacy and confidentiality and health and safety regulations, the awareness and sensitivity needed when working with marginalized groups requires more than compliance training. When academic researchers, like Coates et al (2005) and Wright et al (2014) talk about the impacts of LMS environments on learning, they are usually thinking of this kind of more complex education, especially in comparison with traditional offline courses. While there are no concerns that teachers will be replaced with computers in this context (quite the opposite, in fact – the staff will be relieved not to have to do the teaching), there will still be a need for some kind of facilitated discussion groups for this material. And even with the training components, there will need to be some kind of workplace follow-up to ensure the concepts were understood and are being appropriately utilised (Gibbs et al, 2004). But rather than seeing this as a negative feature, the The MSH AIDS Centre could view this as yet another way of exercising their mandate to provide education in the community to groups who might otherwise be hard to reach with this information.
Sustainability
The board based their decision in part on the future use and sustainability of this platform. In this case, sustainability needs to be measured financially and technologically.
Financial
While a hosted and supported implementation of Moodle is not free, its yearly operating costs are estimated to be around $7,000, well within the $10,000 estimated by the board. As these costs include both the hosting, support, and all major upgrades to the LMS and plugins, it’s unlikely that the organization will incur any additional or unexpected fees.
As the program grows and learner registration and technical support issues increase, it’s likely that more staff time will be needed to keep up with demand. However, most new projects envisioned at this time involve serving vulnerable populations, and the board is confident that they will be able to raise additional funds or find sponsors to support the continued operation of their LMS after they demonstrate success in this project.
Technological
Investing in an LMS that the organization doesn’t have the technical capacity to maintain would be a mistake. Going with a supported solution, like that offered by Lambda, would ensure that the site could always be repaired, but in order to be sustainable the The MSH AIDS Centre must work to train its staff.
To this end, Lambda also offers staff training sessions and webinars that would help the organization to grow these skills internally. Their web department’s existing comfort with light coding suggests that this is a plausible goal.
Future
The needs of the current course are modest, and if the organization intended to stop there, Moodle would feel like overkill – WordPress would have been acceptable; however, the board of directors has a vision for more courses, making this first project a showcase and proof of concept. By making an investment in a robust, affordable, and powerful LMS at this time, the organization is preparing itself for a future of eLearning.
Resources
Bates, A.W. &Sangrà, A. (2011). Managing Technology in Higher Education: Strategies for Transforming Teaching and Learning. San Francisco: Jossey Bass
Coates, H., James, R., & Baldwin, G. (2005). A critical examination of the effects of Learning Management Systems on university teaching and learning. Tertiary Education and Management, 11,(1), 19-36. (PDF)
Gibbs, T., Brigden, D., &Hellenberg, D. (2004). The Education versus Training and the Skills versus Competency debate. South African Family Practice, 46(10), 5-6.
Klassen, V. (2011) Privacy and Cloud-Based Educational Technology in British Columbia Vancouver BC: BCCampus
Moodle Docs. (n.d.). Retrieved February 05, 2016, from https://docs.moodle.org/30/en/Main_page
Growing Revenue Potential With Talent Management Suite: Case Study (Rep.). (2014). Vancouver, BC: Lambda Solutions.
Wright, C. R., Lopes, V., Montgomery, T. C., Reju, S., &Schmoller, S. (2014, April 21). Selecting a Learning Management System: Advice from an Academic Perspective. Retrieved February 05, 2016, from http://er.educause.edu/articles/2014/4/selecting-a-learning-management-system-advice-from-an-academic-perspective
Wyatt, A. T. (2005, July 29). Re: Anyone know costs for WebCT and Blackboard? [Online forum comment]. Retrieved February 05, 2016 from https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=28182