moodle

In our exchanges with users and the Chamilo association that manages the Chamilo user forum, a recurring question often arises:

Hello Chamilo, a quick question:

I was recently asked to highlight the differences between Moodle and Chamilo. From what I’ve observed, both LMS platforms seem to offer similar features through comparable modules.

What sets Chamilo apart from Moodle?

In a growing world with growing education needs, one would think that systems like Chamilo or Moodle would have a continuous growth ensured, year after year. Well, this is certainly true for Chamilo LMS (for now), as it is apparently gaining about 100,000 new users per month (average over the last 12 months), but I am a little in shock at how Moodle is (since a year or so) loosing a considerable amount of sites and users over the last 12 months.

The LMS Evaluation Commitee of the University of North Carolina at Charlorte just published the results of a 5 quarters survey about the implementation of Moodle to replace their current BlackBoard Vista. Although I don't particularly like Moodle (mostly because our users find it much more complicated to use than Dokeos), there are two things that I really liked in the results from this report (and I'm sure there are loads of other interesting data in there if you keep your eyes opened)

There's a nice comparative study (if I get it right, it's based on analysis a few months back) between e-learning solutions here. The nice thing is it offers a cute chart of 4 axis of analysis, by an external company, so this is more likely to be a neutral result. No mention of Blackboard though...

Although not very reliable per se, the following article, written in 2006, has an interesting set of comments (part by me) about statistics about Moodle, Blackboard/WebCT and Sakai, and Dokeos of course. http://zacker.org/higher-ed-lms-market-penetration-moodle-vs-blackboard-vs-sakai

I was playing around a little bit with a code metrics tool on the Ohloh website and, although I'm sure there's some kind of arguable element there as some included libraries add a lot of "noise" in code contributions, I was happily surprised to see that Dokeos isn't doing bad at all and is starting to get back at Moodle, in terms of code, contributors and global activity.