Follow-on to Moodle Paper - Comments from Totara
Had some great feedback from the community about the corporate Moodle paper.
The following comment/response to our Moodle paper was submitted by Richard Wyles on Kineo's LinkedIn group ... thought it was worth adding here, together with my response ...
Richard Wyles •
Thank-you for a timely and interesting read. I
thought I'd add comment or two in my position as CEO of Totara, and also
someone who has been heavily involved in various Moodle R&D efforts
over the past 8 years, including the Moodle Networks and early
scalability efforts cited in the paper that led to OU's successful
adoption. In many ways the Totara distribution feels like a similar
project to others I've led in that all of these initiatives have been
designed to address recognised needs. The Totara distribution came was
born from the collective experiences the founding partners had with
customising Moodle to work in a corporate context. The gaps in
functionality were obvious to us, and that repeating similar
customisations for each corporate wanting to take the plunge, was
wasteful of both their and our resources. It was also obvious that
Moodle’s roadmap was focused quite rightly on the educational space. I
first floated the idea of a corporate distribution of Moodle in a
keynote speech as early as the first Canadian Moodlemoot in Edmonton in
2006.
I prefer to use the term distribution over hybrid as the latter might suggest to some that we've taken two disparate things and joined them. We haven't - we've extended Moodle's feature-set and through the depth of understanding we have within the Kineo Catalyst, and Totara development teams, we've been careful to develop the new functionality in a modular, "pluggable" way that adheres to Moodle's coding styles and standards. From my viewpoint this represents a significant investment into the broader Moodle community, from longtime Moodle contributors and solution vendors, to ensure that it meets the needs of a different market space. I sometimes think of Totara as simply Moodle's "Business Edition" although of course that is an unofficial moniker.
We agree with Elearnity that the LMS marketplace suffers from a "perception of poor user interfaces,overly complex workflows, and high costs for licensing, support and maintenance." We're also of the view that, given the inherent difference between an academic educational model and corporate training learning, then it is unsurprising that ‘out of the box’ Moodle is not widely used in corporate contexts. Our mission is to address those functionality gaps, offer much greater flexibility through the GPL, and offer an alternative that dramatically lowers the costs of ownership - in short a better product at a better price, and with built-in flexibility to go further.
It is early days, like the reports says, but within not much more than a year of launching we have over 150 clients supporting this move, 12 of whom have up to 50,000 users and 3 with up to 250,000 users. We need to get further case studies written up!
Thanks again for an interesting report.
Richard Wyles
CEO - Totara Learning Solutions
I prefer to use the term distribution over hybrid as the latter might suggest to some that we've taken two disparate things and joined them. We haven't - we've extended Moodle's feature-set and through the depth of understanding we have within the Kineo Catalyst, and Totara development teams, we've been careful to develop the new functionality in a modular, "pluggable" way that adheres to Moodle's coding styles and standards. From my viewpoint this represents a significant investment into the broader Moodle community, from longtime Moodle contributors and solution vendors, to ensure that it meets the needs of a different market space. I sometimes think of Totara as simply Moodle's "Business Edition" although of course that is an unofficial moniker.
We agree with Elearnity that the LMS marketplace suffers from a "perception of poor user interfaces,overly complex workflows, and high costs for licensing, support and maintenance." We're also of the view that, given the inherent difference between an academic educational model and corporate training learning, then it is unsurprising that ‘out of the box’ Moodle is not widely used in corporate contexts. Our mission is to address those functionality gaps, offer much greater flexibility through the GPL, and offer an alternative that dramatically lowers the costs of ownership - in short a better product at a better price, and with built-in flexibility to go further.
It is early days, like the reports says, but within not much more than a year of launching we have over 150 clients supporting this move, 12 of whom have up to 50,000 users and 3 with up to 250,000 users. We need to get further case studies written up!
Thanks again for an interesting report.
Richard Wyles
CEO - Totara Learning Solutions
... and my response ...
David Wilson •
Thanks Richard for your comments. Very
constructive and I think reinforcing some of the key points we were
trying to make in our report.
Our research into Moodle in the corporate environment was started a few years ago, and part of it obviously pre-dates the existence of Totara (and some other corporate-focused Moodle variants). We see Totara as specifically trying to bridge the functional gaps to fit into corporate learning models and environments, and we will continue to track your progress with interest.
The main point here is that Moodle gets frequently described as a) an LMS, and b) a suitable corporate solution, without any real understanding of the context of these things. The reality is there are real questions with both parts of this.
Moodle has started to become extensively adopted in corporates, but not as a true LMS, more as an e-learning portal. It is also often used tactically for specific programmes rather than as the global enterprise-wide solution for all learning programmes.
That's fine, but organisations need to understand the difference. It's also interesting that (at least from our research to date), Moodle is rarely used inside corporates as a true VLE either - i.e. to support collaborative asynchronous blended learning programmes.
The second point of suitability is not just a functional issue, but also one of service, deployment and support. Suitability is actually more about the types of service partners supporting corporate customers, and their scope/capability to offer trans-national or global services and enterprise-class solution infrastructure and SLAs.
Overall, we want to help to make corporate buyers more aware of the realities of Moodle today, and to positively influence their approach to Moodle as an opportunity. We also want to continue to encourage and challenge the supply-side of the equation too; to help improve the value for corporates and decrease their risk.
Best regards,
David
Our research into Moodle in the corporate environment was started a few years ago, and part of it obviously pre-dates the existence of Totara (and some other corporate-focused Moodle variants). We see Totara as specifically trying to bridge the functional gaps to fit into corporate learning models and environments, and we will continue to track your progress with interest.
The main point here is that Moodle gets frequently described as a) an LMS, and b) a suitable corporate solution, without any real understanding of the context of these things. The reality is there are real questions with both parts of this.
Moodle has started to become extensively adopted in corporates, but not as a true LMS, more as an e-learning portal. It is also often used tactically for specific programmes rather than as the global enterprise-wide solution for all learning programmes.
That's fine, but organisations need to understand the difference. It's also interesting that (at least from our research to date), Moodle is rarely used inside corporates as a true VLE either - i.e. to support collaborative asynchronous blended learning programmes.
The second point of suitability is not just a functional issue, but also one of service, deployment and support. Suitability is actually more about the types of service partners supporting corporate customers, and their scope/capability to offer trans-national or global services and enterprise-class solution infrastructure and SLAs.
Overall, we want to help to make corporate buyers more aware of the realities of Moodle today, and to positively influence their approach to Moodle as an opportunity. We also want to continue to encourage and challenge the supply-side of the equation too; to help improve the value for corporates and decrease their risk.
Best regards,
David
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