Learning Management System

Things you might not know about Moodle

With every new release, the open-source learning management system, Moodle, continues to enhance and grow.

The days of clunky, uninspiring platforms are history, with improved visual styling and an immensely friendlier user interface, now fully responsive and consistent between devices.

Plus, you’ll now see heightened security settings and a range of gradebook enhancements too. 

There’s a reason why Moodle can vouch for 300 million users worldwide, with a thriving online community of collaborative developers, freely sharing their technical knowledge.

At Eggu, we use Moodle as an effective LMS solution for those clients brand new to digital learning, looking for that complete online package. It provides a great container to securely host and manage all your online training and track user activity; all without breaking the bank. 

We’ll custom design it to your brand and needs, host it, manage it, provide administrative support and even run a technical helpdesk for the end users. Phew – Just another weight off your shoulders.

And the fact that you can use Eggu to create all your bespoke digital learning resources too, you’re guaranteed a high quality, professional and consistent delivery throughout the user experience.

So, with a stack of LMS software to choose from on the market, why can Moodle sometimes be overlooked as a great, affordable solution? We thought we’d fill you in and highlight some of the latest developments and favourite new features we love about working with Moodle.

Themes

Although Moodle have streamlined the course page design to better conserve screen space and improve user navigation, there is always room for improvement when it comes to customising the design to reflect your brand. 

By using pre-built Moodle themes and templates, you can create the right look and feel to seamlessly harmonise with your core website. Users won’t even realise they have ventured to a different site. 

ThemeForest offers a host of affordable themes and templates to help create a modern and eye-catching website for your learning environment.

All are fully customisable, allowing you to change fonts, colours and layouts. They’re super-intuitive too, built with modular blocks to mix and match in the best way that works for you.

Plus, you’ll find them packed with lots of additional features and plugins, all of which are regularly updated with new options. 

Are faves right now are Lambda, Purity and Moove.

Course layouts

One of the key improvements in Moodle 4.0 was the addition of a new collapsible and expandable Course Index on the course page.

This revised presentation of materials offers an easier and quicker solution for students to locate activities or resources and educators to track activity completion.

But never just be restricted to the formats offered within the standard Moodle. There are plenty of plugins on the market too, which provide alternate course layouts to play around with.

The Buttons course format plugin for example, is a great, simple plugin to cleverly group activities, allowing the user to navigate sections one-by-one, without being overwhelmed with a wealth of learning content in one go. The buttons are fully customisable in terms of shape, colour and listing and allow for an alternate course layout for a touch of variety. 

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS framework for building responsive, mobile-first front-end web development. And great news – it’s fully compatible with Moodle.

When styling pages and components in Moodle, rather than inventing things from scratch that need custom styling, it’s always helpful to re-use pre-built snippets from Bootstrap.

This gives you a great start in pulling together new layouts and components, by integrating simple code to further customise your Moodle site. 

The great news is that development has already begun on upgrading Moodle from Bootstrap 4 to Bootstrap 5, with Moodle 4.6 now planned for the full launch of the latest software.

Completion progress block

The completion progress block is a great time-management tool for students, visually representing anything the user needs to complete on the course, with colour coding for quick reference. This will collate a ‘to do’ list of anything on the course with activity completion settings. 

But for teachers, managers or site admins, you can also get a helpful overview of students’ progress so far, allowing identification of those needing further support. 

Report builder

Not well versed in SQL? Creating database reports has historically required in-depth technical knowledge and hard coding. 

But the Report Builder, originally a feature of Moodle Workplace, has now been incorporated into Moodle 4.0, allowing you to easily create custom, dynamic reports, specific to your data needs. 

Access to such data is key to measure student progress, analyse the learning impact and improve course delivery.

Need your own dedicated LMS?

At Eggu, our dedicated Moodle learning management system subscription packages are based on the estimated number of users and start from as little as £2,000 + VAT per year. Even better, the more courses and resources you add to your platform, the more cost-effective it becomes. 

Why not speak to Eggu about your own dedicated Moodle platform to host and manage your bespoke digital learning?