Currently there are many e-Learning platforms, and Moodle is one of the most used ones give it’s features and functions.
**What is Moodle?**
It’s a learning management platform designed to help educators create online courses and virtual learning environments. It is a Free Software, for which it does not pay for licenses and its modules can be copied and modified.
**Moodle features:**
- It is scalable, its codes can be modified according to the needs.
- It allows to personalize the platform.
- Different scales can be used for evaluations.
- It allows you to choose between several course formats: Weekly, by themes, tabs, menu, social, among others.
- It is compatible with any web browser, independent of the operating system used.
- It allows to have a record of the user's access, keeping a history of each of them.
- It is written in PHP.
- It has different activities for the courses: Consultation, homework, dialogue.
- It is a multi-user platform.
- It is translated into more than 80 languages.
- It has the ability to manage groups, which can have separate access to forums, chat and tasks.
- It can be integrated with email to send feedback information, forums handle HTML or text formats.
- It has different modules, among the most outstanding are:
**Tasks:** allows assigning tasks with dates of compliance and control of qualifications.
**Forum:** it allows to add image of the author, to make registries, to establish policies of each one of the forums.
**Questionnaires:** you can create a database and be re-used, you can make evaluations and obtain the results automatically, you can define the number of times to perform each questionnaire.
**Query:** in this module you can make votes to select topics, schedules among others.
**Disadvantages of Moodle:**
It shows the same questionnaires established by modules.
Due to it’s online learning nature there is no teacher-student relationship.
It generates a feeling of isolation.
Depending on which version of Moodle we work with, the default configuration will be different.
D**ifferences and similarities between Moodle and other e-learning platforms.**
- The platforms (Dokeos) and (Caroline), are little modifiable, being that Moodle is totally modifiable.
- The Dokeos platform handles only videoconferencing and the task mailbox, moodle is used for more activities such as consultation, daily glossary, database and workshop.
- Dokeos allows customizing the covers, moodle is less friendly in the graphic interface.
- A similarity between Dokeos, Caroline and Moodle is that they can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, it allows working with multiple applications,
- Dokeos and Moodle both allow to see the degree of advancement by users in each course that are involved.
- Dokeos measures the user's time in each course and in each unit while moodle can not make these measurements.
In conclusion we can say that virtual platforms are educational scenarios designed according to a distance learning methodology, where depending on the characteristics for which they will be used, the type of platform to be used must be determined.