Moomis

As someone who uses Moodle as a tool to support blended learning projects for several of my corporate clients, I was interested to hear Mark Tointon's speak at the recent eLearning Network showcase about some new add-ons for Moodle which are specifically designed to support corporate use of the tool. As Mark explained, there are good reasons why Moodle has a hard job reaching out to corporate users:

• the mortorboard logo
• the naive font
• the friendly name
• its origins in academia
• the fact that it is free!

These problems of perception can be overcome, but corporates may still be frustrated that, although Moodle is an excellent course delivery tool, it was never designed to tackle the sorts of problems that many corporates face, and which generally lead them to a conventional learning management system.

Mark's company, Aardpress, could have regarded this as an opportunity to create and sell expensive add-on functionality for Moodle. But luckily they didn't, deciding instead to contribute their own tools to the open source Moodle toolkit.

Moomis, their Modular Object-Orientated Management Information System would you believe, adds all sorts of corporate LMS-type functionality, in the form of simple Moodle blocks:

• A groups function which allows administrators to allocate any number of users to any number of different groups and designate any number of managers to each group. Once users are allocated to groups, administrators and managers can use the Report Creator to obtain management information for those groups including courses completed, quiz scores, levels of access and Continuing Professional Development (CPD).
• CPD hours/points are added automatically to users' records for any e-learning courses they complete. Furthermore, users can add CPD accrued from other events to their own records as required.
• Administrators and managers have access to smart communication tools, which comprise an email module to enable emails to be sent to specific users or any group of users and a simple 'digital Post-It note' module enabling messages to be posted to individuals or specific groups of users.
• Businesses can use the Competency Manager to assess and track levels of competence and then use the Performance Manager to set and assess personal objectives for each employee that reflect whole business objectives.
• The Events Manager can be used to create 'real world' events (face-to-face) that can be allocated to users either as standalone events, linked to competencies or linked to personal objectives.

I expect Aardpress hope to benefit by providing supporting services and good luck to them in that. From my point of view this is yet more great functionality that neither I, nor my clients, will have to pay for.