Assignment #1

Literature Review on LMS: Moodle

Student Name –

Student Number –
Introduction

In past years, information and technology has grown up so effectively that it entered even in the

learning imparted to the students. The use of information and communication technology (ICT) has

helped in providing quality to the learning efforts by educational institutions with the help of internet

access and online learning environments. Every online learning system is made up of multiple

components such as content management system (CMS), learning content management system (LCMS)

and learning management system (LMS) (Aydin & Tirkes, 2010). The use of technology helps the

students and learners to learn, perform and evaluate using online systems where the students and

teachers are interconnected with the learning content. In the conditions such as COVID-19 where the

students are unable to attend the institutions, these learning management systems are very helpful to

impart education and minimise the loss of a student during his academic years (Beatty & Ulasewicz,

2006). Practical learning in the fair of teaching helps to add quality to the education and scientific

cooperation for the nations to grow. Sharing the experience in the educational sphere requires deep

understanding and representation of knowledge, which can be elevated by exchanging information at

the national level and at the international level. To have an effective understanding of advanced topics,

the education has stepped into the utilisation of presentations, video lectures and tutorials, and

practical online labs to give a better hands-on experience in a single package called “Learning

Management System” that effectively helps the learners pursue a program or a course according to his

learning capabilities, by using features like communication chat, gradebook, sharing, evaluation and

feedback. In addition to this, the educators require a better control and automated software to monitor

and keep a track of every student available so that the knowledge attained must be on the basis of

practice and application. I learning management system platform helps to teach both younger and older

generations by developing the platform capable of assigning a secure account for every learner who can

login and have access to the learning modules. It also provides some advanced features that allow
teachers to access information, teachers to grant grades to the students, and teachers to assigned tasks.

On the other hand, the students can log in to their account, perform their activities, submit assignments,

and learn about any type of course across the world (Evgenievich Egorov et al., 2021).

Learning Management Systems

A learning management system can be described as a software application which completely automate

the work such as administration, monitoring, tracking and generating the reports of all the training

events or the modules of a course (Evgenievich Egorov et al., 2021). The learning management system

helps the student access the course content and provides a complete structure where the student learns

effectively by different types of applications. A learning management system may have video lectures,

presentations, LABs, tutorials, projects, midterm exams and final evaluative exams (Evgenievich Egorov

et al., 2021). The learning management system keeps track of the learner's performance and helps him

prepare for both long-term and short-term strategies to meet the passing goal.

The learning management system must have capabilities to easily control it using a centralised and

automatic system for training and learning. The Learning management system must provide self-service

and self-guided modules where the student may interact for gaining knowledge. The learning

management system must be able to support probability and standards of the educational institution. It

should also be capable of personalising the content so that the user gets user friendly environment

(Kerimbayev et al., 2017). The learning management system should also be able to consolidate training

initiatives on large scale using web-based environment.

In short, a learning management system is primarily divided into three main parts where the first one

provides the learning tools, the second part provides the communication tools and the last part is used

as a productivity tool. Learning management system helps the user to register, manage the learning

modules, achieve results from the performed activities in the system, integrate with other laboratories,
tutorials and group level activities. Learning management system also helps the learner to integrate with

external information systems used for developing the learning content, educational materials or the

tests. It is a software front-end application which is connected to the database management system and

provides the content as a required on the permission of the instructor (Simanullang & Rajagukguk,

2020).

There are multiple learning management systems available, such as Canvas, Moodle, Noverant, D2L,

Blackboard, Totara, saba, absorb, etc that universities and colleges prefer to conduct educational

activities remotely over the controlled environment (Zabolotniaia et al., 2020). These learning

management systems not only helps to disseminate information among the learners but also provide a

system where the students can submit their completed tasks for evaluation.

Moodle

Moodle is an open-source learning management system that provides the capability to install the

learning environment on individual machines and provides a single administrative interface where all

the applications, content, and evaluation tools are integrated. Moodle is also the first open-source

platform which was developed in 2001 and is based on the social constructionist pedagogical principle.

Moodle is developed by Martin Dougiamas having the latest stable release version 3.11.0 published on

15 May 2021 (Evgenievich Egorov et al., 2021). The code of Moodle is written in PHP and is freely

available under the GNU General Public license (GPL) (Kerimbayev et al., 2017). Moodle also allows

synchronous and asynchronous interactions by the learner. It also supports a personal space for writing

and saving the private information.

There are multiple characteristics which helps the learning management systems be flexible, easy to use,

able to integrate, and scalable in Moodle. Moodle was first released in Australia as a tool inspired to

support distance learning with more interaction(Kerimbayev et al., 2017). Currently, it has more than
200 million active users covering 60% of the universities and institutions across the world. Moodle is

able to support the features such as performing online activities, submission of the assignments,

performing attendance of the students, chats, glossary, lesson, quiz, file, workshops and surveys

required for the educational purpose. The use of LMS like Moodle not only system as the education but

also helps the instructor concentrate on every student's work evaluation. This capability makes it easy

and more effective for the instructor to monitor the overall growth of the learner. In 2020, the Moodle

has come up with a superior mobile application that gives a complete application of the value-based

interaction environment (Subramanian et al., 2014). This application provides additional facilities such as

cloud-based storage and establishing synchronous and asynchronous communication with any user

available in the group. The mobile application makes use of technologies such as Ajax, REST and JSON

(Zabolotniaia et al., 2020). All the communication is based on the Internet as the Moodle API is

integrated with plugins. This application is able to run both on android as well as iOS platforms. The

mobile platform of the Moodle is able to support quiz, objective type answers and conduct

communication using voice or chat.

Advantages and Disadvantages

There are multiple advantages for using Moodle such as:

Moodle gives the instructor the ability to selectively choose and release course content like

presentations, training, and PDF documents on desired dates. It is very easy to conduct a variety of tests

on Moodle as compare to other LMS (Cabero-Almenara et al., 2019). For the teacher, report of all the

students can be generated in Moodle. It also includes a complete grade book that helps to know about

the current marks scored by the student. For communication, Moodle provides real-time chat with logs

and the ability to share the chat (Kerimbayev et al., 2017). Moodle also provides discussion forms and

group work activities where multiple learners can collaborate on a single task. Moodle learning
management system can be configured and customised with the help of plugins and themes. The

Moodle can easily run on any platform like Windows, macOS, UNIX, Linux and Ubuntu (Subramanian et

al., 2014). As Moodle is one of the oldest LMS, does it have a large community of developers and experts

which are helpful in case any collaboration, expansion or improvement is required. Moodle can easily

integrate with learning analytics tool such as LearnerScript for performing analytics and identifying

insights (Zabolotniaia et al., 2020). Moodle can provide a continuous feedback system where the trainer

and teachers use different pedagogic methods to enhance the learning efforts. It also helps the educator

learn about the best possible use of tools such as multiple-choice questions, essay answers, or short

answers that provide the best results in particular situations. Moodle has multiple options for group

participation where the groups can be pre-assigned in the class or based on the students’ grades. The

interface editing tools in the Moodle gives a complete view of what the student can see and what the

instructor can see. The quick editing tools helps to re-order, indent, delete, activate or deactivate any

kind of activity for a student or a group of students in Moodle (Zabolotniaia et al., 2020). This learning

system provides an individual space for saving the drafts add the learner's personal files, which the

instructor or peers cannot view.

On exploring further, it can be also found that Moodle is still immature and cannot handle large

projects. Although Moodle is effective for colleges and universities for small to medium size but for large

schools Moodle still lacks (Kumar & Sharma, 2016). During the asynchronous discussion in Moodle,

students can create reflective and meaningful posts. In Moodle the learner cannot revise the posts that

had made after reflecting on our topic. Moodle includes an activity called assignment where the learners

can upload their work and the instructor can evaluate it (Kc, 2017). In this activity, the student cannot

view each other’s work and cannot give feedback on others submission if required. Apart from this, the

teacher cannot re-post a commented file for any student to be reviewed in Moodle. Moodle is not

affective in the terms of file storage and sharing with other users. Thus, it does not provide the ability to
work collaboratively. Also, the entire content and study material cannot be stored in the Moodle nor

does it provide any backup feature for the same (Kc, 2017). While using the Moodle learning

management system, administrator cannot limit the user access by controlling permissions. Similarly,

Moodle cannot assign multiple roles to multiple users at a time. In addition to this, the Moodle also lacks

the ability to identify the talent demonstrated by the learner or provide effective measures to improve

the learner's efficiency with respect to different learning activities.

Conclusion

Learning management systems have proved to be one of the most effective online tools for imparting

education to the learners at different geographical locations. This tool has worked best in situations like

the recent pandemic and helped the educators monitor the student to help overall growth. Based on

the review from the article it can be easily found that open-source platforms are proving to be more

beneficial and modifiable according to the user requirements where the institutional organisations are

able to control the low-cost of its implementation. Whereas in comparison with commercial platforms,

open-source Learning management systems like Moodle lack certain capabilities that are need of the

hour. The use of Moodle as the learning management system has achieved great success due to the

presence of a large developer community and the availability of plug-ins for customising the learning

environment. The learning management system is found to be flexible and easy to use according to the

educator's demands and the learner. Moodle has some of the advantages related to personalisation,

management of the private information where the learner can send and receive personal messages

among other users or the instructors. Moodle has a low cost of operation because it is an open-source

platform with a huge community that constantly develops more and more plug-ins to add features. Also,

the features like synchronous and asynchronous interaction and the ability to see the users' online

presence make it the best choice for online learning management systems. Finally, the LMS has proved
to be the most important part of educational institutions today. It can help scale the learning process by

maintaining the quality and detailed monitoring of the learners. Moodle is one of the most cost effective

as it is continuously improving by adding more features with the help of Open-source API and PHP

programming codes.

References

Aydin, C. C., & Tirkes, G. (2010). Open source learning management systems in e-learning and Moodle.

IEEE EDUCON 2010 Conference,

http://www.ieec.uned.es/investigacion/educon2010/searchtool/educon2010/papers/

2010s03f01.pdf

Beatty, B., & Ulasewicz, C. (2006). Faculty perspectives on moving from Blackboard to the Moodle

learning management system. TechTrends, 50(4), 36-45.

https://research.moodle.org/94/1/Beatty%20%282006%29%20Faculty%20Perspectives%20on

%20Moving%20%20from%20Blackboard%20to%20the%20Moodle%20%20Learning

%20Management%20System.pdf

Cabero-Almenara, J., Arancibia, M., & Del Prete, A. (2019). Technical and didactic knowledge of the

Moodle LMS in higher education. Beyond functional use. Journal of New Approaches in

Educational Research (NAER Journal), 8(1), 25-33.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330399922_Technical_and_Didactic_Knowledge_of_

the_Moodle_LMS_in_Higher_Education_Beyond_Functional_Use

Evgenievich Egorov, E., Petrovna Prokhorova, M., Evgenievna Lebedeva, T., Aleksandrovna Mineeva, O.,

& Yevgenyevna Tsvetkova, S. (2021). Moodle LMS: Positive and Negative Aspects of Using

Distance Education in Higher Education Institutions. Journal of Educational Psychology-

Propositos y Representaciones, 9. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1299462.pdf

Kc, D. (2017). Evaluation of moodle features at kajaani university of applied sciences–case study.

Procedia computer science, 116, 121-128.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050917320628

Kerimbayev, N., Kultan, J., Abdykarimova, S., & Akramova, A. (2017). LMS Moodle: Distance

international education in cooperation of higher education institutions of different countries.

Education and information technologies, 22(5), 2125-2139. https://research.moodle.org/395/

Kumar, V., & Sharma, D. (2016). Creating collaborative and convenient learning environment using

cloud-based moodle LMS: an instructor and administrator perspective. International Journal of

Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies (IJWLTT), 11(1), 35-50.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293824755_Creating_Collaborative_and_Convenient

_Learning_Environment_Using_Cloud-

Based_Moodle_LMS_An_Instructor_and_Administrator_Perspective

Simanullang, N., & Rajagukguk, J. (2020). Learning Management System (LMS) Based On Moodle To

Improve Students Learning Activity. Journal of Physics: Conference Series,

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340002074_Learning_Management_System_LMS_B

ased_On_Moodle_To_Improve_Students_Learning_Activity

Subramanian, P., Zainuddin, N., Alatawi, S., Javabdeh, T., & Hussin, A. (2014). A study of comparison

between Moodle and Blackboard based on case studies for better LMS. Journal of Information

Systems Research and Innovation, 6, 26-33.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327620324_The_state-of-the-

art_matrix_analysis_for_usability_of_learning_management_systems

Zabolotniaia, M., Cheng, Z., Dorozhkin, E., & Lyzhin, A. (2020). Use of the LMS Moodle for an effective

implementation of an innovative policy in higher educational institutions. International Journal

of Emerging Technologies in Learning (iJET), 15(13), 172-189.

https://online-journals.org/index.php/i-jet/article/view/14945