10 reasons why Moodle is the best corporate training LMS

Top 10 Reasons Why Moodle Is The Best LMS For Corporate Training

The COVID 19 pandemic has affected the functioning of most companies around the globe. Navigating this crisis is a huge challenge especially for the L&D teams as they grapple with executing their workplace training and onboarding initiatives. 

Business organizations cannot afford to skip corporate training. It’s a great way to connect with new hires, train them to make them technically aware of their work or job roles and socially aware of the specific workplace culture and values. 

Things are moving online, and implementing a whole onboarding/corporate training LMS on a budget amid the COVID 19 lockdown seems to be the only sensible option.

You must be wondering how! Let’s find out

Moodle for the win

One of the most effective ways to go about this is to set up a corporate training program using Moodle. It’s a massively popular open-source LMS with a solid user base of over 78 million users around the world. Check out the updated stats here for an even clearer picture of how powerful Moodle is. 

Talking about ways to set up Moodle, you can configure a full-fledged training LMS using the basic Moodle functionality. Else you could even build a dedicated corporate training LMS to fulfill your business training needs. Moodle gives you enough

We’re sure Moodle must be one of the options in your LMS consideration list. Should you opt for Moodle? We don’t see any reason why anyone would say ‘NO’. In fact, there are several reasons why Moodle is the best choice for executing your corporate training programs. 

Want to know why?

Here are the top 9 reasons why you should say YES to Moodle. And do stay put to read till the end for the BONUS reason.

Top 10 Reasons why Moodle is the best LMS for corporate training

#1 Cost-effective training platform

Moodle is an open-source LMS that is regularly updated by a dedicated team of Moodle developers to keep up with changing training needs and trends. L&D experts can fully utilize Moodle for effective, low-cost training. Moodle is freely available for download. Once downloaded, you can easily set it up on your own or if you think this is too much work, you can reach out to Moodle specialists for the entire hosting and set up assistance. 

Apart from the initial set up cost, Moodle costs you absolutely nothing. You can reap maximum benefit from the support, development, the discussion forum, and the Moodle plugins for FREE. 

#2 High flexibility and customizability 

Even without commercial focus, Moodle is a super flexible LMS with solid support for a wide range of free of cost customizations and integrations. Moodle supports many popular integrations. 

You can easily customize your corporate training content in different formats such as SCORM courses, Moodle courses, LTI courses, xAPI, etc. Moodle has a repository of several free themes such as Boost, Fordson, and Adaptable that can be used to customize your corporate training site to give it a professional, polished look and feel. 

The best part is Moodle also extends full support to plenty of high functionality, commercial themes for an even refurbished Moodle experience. 

Pro Tip 1 – If you’re looking for a theme that’s customizable and changes the entire look of your Moodle LMS, then Edwiser RemUI theme is a great choice. It can be used either out of the box or fully personalized to meet your corporate training requirements.  

Pro Tip 2  – When it comes to grading, Moodle has flexible grading tools that can come in handy to evaluate your employees during the onboarding duration. For a more dynamic, faster, and easier grading in Moodle, you could consider an extension such as Edwiser RapidGrader – a Moodle plugin designed to quicken the grading process. 

To further expand the scope of integrations, many have been added via third-party development efforts. Moodle extends full support to most authentication systems. We’ve listed a few below:

  • CAS Server, External Database, FirstClass Server, IMAP server, LDAP Server, NNTP Server, POP3 Server, RADIUS server,
  • Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, VKontakte, Yahoo, Twitter
  • Github
  • Dropbox

It’s great that you can easily engage with your training content in Moodle by directly logging in through your existing LinkedIn profile

There’s more! Talking about integrations with different CMSes, Moodle offers support to several popular CMS. Some of them are listed below:

  • WordPress, Drupal, Joomla
  • Support for repositories such as Wikimedia, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, MERLOT, Picasa Web Album, Amazon S3, OneDrive, and YouTube

You can access all your OneDrive business files from within Moodle using Office 365 and OneNote integration.  

Moodle is a complete package and offers a whole spectrum of integrations. The list is exhaustive and if anything, this speaks volumes about how flexible Moodle is. Simply put, you have all your corporate training LMS needs covered by Moodle.

#3 On-the-Go training

Moodle offers an official mobile app for the employees to learn on-the-go. This app allows users to browse training courses in offline mode. receive instant notifications of messages and other events, track learning progress, and much more. 

The mobile app is 100 percent customizable and provides a consistent learning experience across multiple devices and screen sizes. 

Pro Tip – We’d recommend taking the microlearning route. Apart from mobile training, you can also break up the training material and agenda into bite-sized pieces with deadline-based small learning exercises so that your hires don’t get too overwhelmed with information overload. Taking this approach can lead to higher retention rates as absorbing smaller chunks of content is easier to process. 

#4 In-depth reporting and analytics

With a limited budget during the pandemic, Moodle is the best option when it comes to analytics to monitor and track your corporate training program. Tracking in a training program is a major concern for many reasons: engagement, ROI, improvements to future training, and key business insights. 

Moodle can accurately generate reports on the activities and interactions of your employees. Also, for you and your trainee hires to be on the same page,  you can even share reports regarding their training progress and send scores via email. The reporting system in Moodle is pretty reliable and the scores can even be sent to respective managers to ease decision-making.

Pro Tip – Here are some good reporting and analytics tools in Moodle

The Training Sessions Reports can be used to track learners in professional environments applicable to single users or a group. 

The Configurable Reports can be used by trainers and onboarding managers to pull different types of customized reports without any SQL knowledge. 

Here are some benefits of using the Configurable Reports plugin:

  • Classify or break them down by courses, categories, users, or timeline for better analysis
  • Developers can also custom create their own reports. 
  • Plenty of advanced features such as Filters, pagination, logic conditions and permissions, plots, template support, export to XLS, etc. to adapt to corporate training LMS

Check out this article for more details on the best reporting plugins in Moodle

#5 On-premise and cloud hosting

Moodle is simple to set up but might require a bit of technical expertise. You can set and configure it easily using either Moodle Cloud (cloud-hosted corporate training LMS) or you can even set it up all by yourself with the help of your in-house tech team. We’ve created a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to set up your Moodle LMS right from scratch.

MoodleCloud: MoodleCloud is the cloud-hosted version of Moodle. It offers both free and paid plans with varying users and data space available. You could pick the right plan based on your requirements without blowing your budget. MoodleCloud is a great place to start exploring and experimenting with Moodle. It is an ideal option for small business organizations that are just starting out with Moodle.  

Moodle Partners: The Moodle Partner Network is a team of Moodle experts who provide dedicated Moodle services. They take charge of all the needs right from installation, configuration, integration, to hosting of your Moodle site. It’s expensive compared to the Moodle Cloud option but what’s great is that these services literally handhold you from start to finish if you lack the expertise. This is great for larger organizations with heavy operations spilling over to different countries across the globe.

#6 Employee engagement features

We agree that keeping the virtual audience engaged is not easy. You don’t want your training modules created with so much effort to fall flat. Your program should act as a great starting point as it’s the first point of contact your new hires make with your organization. So, make it a point to create a good first impression by diversifying your training content. 

There are two effective ways to go about this:

  • To make use of different course formats and present content in multiple ways
  • To make your program more dynamic by applying gamification techniques [Highly recommended]

Gamified training at workplaces promotes interactive learning and deeper professional understanding. Needless to say, if your employees engage well, they are more likely to retain better and perform better in the long run – good for the company’s future. You can use a bunch of tools in Moodle to create interactive content such as H5P, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Presenter, Articulate Storyline, etc.

Moodle H5P is a free authoring tool that can be used to make training presentations with interactive slides, interactive videos with elements like MCQs, tables, pictures, web resources, text-based turning cards, memory games, etc. There are also about 300 additional downloadable course activities and resources available for free. 

Level Up, Ranking Block and Badge Awarder are some popular free plugins

  • Level Up can be used to track visual progress and experience of employees
  • Ranking Block helps display the ranks of employees based on their performance
  • Badge Awarder works like a certificate wherein custom badges are awarded within a particular training course

To foster active participation, a really good way to motivate and pep up your employees is to reward them with certificates on reaching crucial training milestones. The Certificate module works well in this case. These certificates can be easily customized the way you want in order to match your company branding. Your new hires are going to appreciate the personal touch added to their certificates. 

#7 Effective collaboration 

For meaningful collaborations, Moodle supports several web conferencing tools to make the process of virtual corporate training much easier. Moodle integrates seamlessly with WebEx, Adobe Connect, BigBlueButton, OpenMeetings, Google Hangouts for top class online onboarding, and training discussions.

  • You can use  Cohorts for users based on job roles to quickly enroll employees with the same job functionally into a course. To keep managers of respective employees in the loop, you can assign a parent role allowing them to review progress and completion status
  • Groups can be used to customize training elements for different types of employees going through the same course. You can also use the blog feature to keep the employees updated with the latest happenings in the organization
  • The  Quiz module will help you effectively test the knowledge of your employees
  • The Feedback module can then be used to create custom surveys. These surveys can act as a great source of information and will help you glean key insights about your employees. 

Pro Tip – Grading in Moodle can be a tedious process. Well, you can let out a huge sigh! The Edwiser RapidGrader plugin is specially built to expedite feedback and take down your stress levels through the bumpy ride of Moodle grading. 

#8 Ease of commercializing training programs

Have you thought about driving extra revenue through your corporate training programs? Sounds like a lucrative idea! If at any point in time, you decide to monetize relevant modules of your workplace training program, Moodle won’t disappoint. You could integrate a plethora of plugins to set up a holistic online course selling store. One such plugin is Edwiser Bridge

Pro Tip- Edwiser Bridge allows you to connect Moodle with WordPress. And enables selling your courses online with the support of over 160 payment gateways through the Edwiser Bridge PRO.

With this premium version of Edwiser Bridge, you could effortlessly add multiple payment gateways, sell courses as WooCommerce products, market, and sell your training modules as bundles, control pricing, discounts, and coupons as well as automate enrollments.

#9 Great global community support

Moodle is supported by a global community of passionate educators, L&D experts, and professionals who are working round the clock to improve the online learning and training experience it provides. The developers constantly work towards updating the code to build a better and more modern user experience. So, you can be assured that all the plugins you use in the Moodle universe are up-to-date following the education and training trends. 

Time to say Hi to the BONUS recommendation 🙂

#10 Moodle Workplace [BONUS]

Moodle was primarily built to create LMS for educational institutions. But it does give you enough options as mentioned in the above pointers to create a corporate training LMS. Moodle core is flexible enough to be optimized for all kinds of corporate training environments. It helps you deliver your training content with the support of a variety of in-house and third-party plugins. But you also have the option to pick Moodle Workplace

Moodle HQ exclusively rolled out Moodle Workplace for organizations worldwide to meet specific business, professional training, and onboarding needs of companies. It’s not free unlike core Moodle and is only available through your Moodle hosting partner.

Some of the features it offers are: 

  • Multi-tenancy features to delegate LMS management to individual departments, offshoots within the parent company
  • Creation of training paths and certifications
  • Intuitive & customizable reporting with instant preview filter
  • Workflow automation tools to automate enrollments, certificate allocation and security & control management in user groups
  • Ability to integrate your workforce training and development with other HR systems, designations and assigning specific to-dos 

Moreover, Moodle Workplace is equipped with a clean design and a highly intuitive interface. You can tweak the look and feel of the platform to match your company branding and even add shortcuts to various admin features.

Last but not least, it also has a mobile learning app so that your hires can conveniently access high-quality training content from any device, any location. You can also develop your own brand-specific Moodle Workplace app. The mobile app not only adds convenience to the hectic life of your employees but also adds a lot more credibility and authority to your training program.

Conclusion

With the changing times, there is a constant hustle between different LMS in the market to be as relevant as possible to modern learning needs. Quite obviously, Moodle takes the cake in this case.  It’s a super-competent LMS, that scores incredibly well on both functionality and power fronts. 

So, with a little tweaking, you can make traditional Moodle work for your organization and bend it to your needs to build a complete corporate training LMS. Else you could opt for Moodle Workplace; to create a 100 percent dedicated corporate training LMS specializing in effective onboarding, employee training, and business knowledge sharing across the organization.

What have you chosen and why? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

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