Moodle in Corporations

Clive just posted - Apples and Pears - about the eLearningGuild's new report on Learning Management Systems. I was one of the authors of the report and it was interesting to have an opportunity to interview people and see the numbers produced through a pretty extensive interview process.

Clive points out one of the more interesting discoveries in the survey results numbers - Moodle comes back as being used inside lots of corporations. In fact, it appears near the top in market share even among larger corporations.

However, as Clive points out, this is somewhat misleading (and the report covers the difference between an CMS, LMS and TMS). We had a fair amount of debate among the researchers about how to handle the fact that Moodle comes out being used inside a lot of corporations, but often used in a very limited fashion. We tried to handle it by drawing distinctions where possible, but the fact remains that lots of companies are using Moodle.

On the other hand, you should know that when a corporation uses Moodle they often are using it for some very simple course delivery, creating assessments, etc. In fact, if you only have a couple of courses or you need to put up an environment for a couple of eLearning courses, then Moodle may be a great option.

At the same time, every large company that I interviewed who had indicated they used Moodle, were only using Moodle as a short-term solution on the way to something more or as a targeted solution.

Bottom line - consider Moodle for these kinds of situations. But to paraphrase Clint Eastwood - A man's got to know Moodles limitations.