Moodle

Moodle is one of the world's most popular open-source e-learning platforms, that is, a learning management system (LMS). Written in PHP and backed by a MySQL or PostgreSQL database, it lets institutions build online courses, publish materials, run assessments and track learner progress.

How Moodle works

Moodle organises teaching around courses that learners enrol in with assigned roles (teacher, student, administrator). Each course is a set of activities and resources assembled from modules. The platform's key elements:

• Activities — quizzes, assignments, forums, surveys and interactive lessons graded automatically or by hand.
• Resources — files, content pages, links and multimedia shared with participants.
• Roles and permissions — fine-grained access control over content and features at course and site level.
• Plugins — a rich ecosystem of extensions adding integrations, themes and new activity types.
• Gradebook — automatic collection and calculation of activity results into a coherent progress report.
• Reports and analytics — tracking participant activity, attendance and course completion.

Moodle in practice

Moodle is used by educational institutions and corporate training teams alike:

1. Universities and schools — full handling of courses, grades, deadlines and student communication.
2. Corporate training — employee onboarding, mandatory courses and certification with automated reporting.
3. Commercial courses — selling access to online content with payment integration.

Because Moodle can spike during exam periods, when hundreds of users log in at once, it's worth running on hosting with headroom — a well-chosen VPS or managed server keeps the platform stable even under traffic surges. It's also worth enabling a caching layer and regularly backing up the database and course files to protect years of teaching material from loss.