Why Moodle has become such a big success

In a recent podcast, Prof. Michael Kerres –director of the Duisburg Learning Lab – has commented on the success of the Moodle LMS. Kerres states that Moodle is about to dominate the market for Open Source LMS. In his view, this phenomenon cannot be traced back to the technical features of the Moodle LMS.

Experiences from the Duisburg Learning Lab – where several LMS are hosted in parallel and users are free to choose their favorite system – have shown that a majority of users prefer Moodle to other LMS. Why?

Kerres’ hypothesis: Moodle appears most appealing to all target groups within a virtual learning environment. System administrators are happy about the easy installation procedure and the standard set of third-party software (Webserver, PHP, MySQL). Authors and teachers are supported by the easy-to-use authoring tool and course environment which do not require extra training. And finally, learners take advantage from its intuitive graphical user interface supporting as well as its collaboration tools that foster the building of learning communities.

Concluding, Kerres argues that Moodle will win the competition with other Open Source LMS not only in the short term but also in the middle term perspective.

If one critically reviews Kerres’ argumentation, several concerns cross one’s mind:

• There is no reliable data about the German market share of Moodle in the field of Open Source LMS. There certainly is a dominance of Moodle in terms of media coverage but this does not necessarily reflect its actual deployment.
• At least for the UK, we have a more reliable data basis for the market share of Moodle in Further and Higher Education Institutions. According to the OSS Watch Survey 2006, 56% of Further Education Institutions (FE) and only 9% of Higher Education Institutions (HE) use Moodle as Virtual Learning Environment. But: Except for Moodle, the only OS LMS which has been taken into account in the survey is Bodington. Thus, these figures have to be regarded with caution.
• Setting up Moodle is easy and it does not require specialized third-party software to be installed by the administrator. But this is also true for many other LMS.
• Admittedly, Moodle’s technical features are not outstanding so indeed its attractiveness must be founded in Moodle’s usability.

Moodle - hype or not?

In his podcast, Prof. Kerres also states that moodle’s current high profile among the educational community contains some irrational traits. And indeed, it has often been observed in various economic sectors that market participants are not immune against irrational behaviour.

But at the time being, the question if we are currently experiencing a Moodle hype cannot be answered. It might be that we are currently undergoing the advent of a consolidation in the OS LMS market, with Moodle taking the lead role because of its usability. Exciting times ahead.

6 comments October 13th, 2006