We had two main reasons for getting started with Moodle:
Of course, Moodle also proved to be Open Source (source code of the software is free), but it was "easily adaptable". It is often underestimated how much work it takes to take a Moodle environment to an acceptable level. Both graphically and technically, in many cases the basics don't offer enough ease of use to provide a pleasant learning experience for the learner.
To set up your own Moodle environment you will need developers who will take care of a number of things:
Even though Moodle doesn't charge licensing fees, you'll lose money hiring developers. The more you customize Moodle to suit your needs, the more it will cost to start up, but it will also make future maintenance more expensive. Moodle's security patches are written for standard Moodle installations. Often these patches need to be made suitable for your custom Moodle installations. This takes time for the developers and can easily lead to malfunctions that affect the students.
Moodle indicates that the system is adaptable. In practice, this means being able to adjust some styles and colour schemes. Truly fundamental changes in design can't just be made. You have to have a completely new layout (theme) developed by a specialist agency. Every Moodle update must be accompanied by an update to this theme.
In addition to developing a new theme, you'll also have to deal with extra maintenance costs because your Moodle is based on a custom theme.
If you want to realise a beautiful and fitting theme within Moodle, the investment can be between €15,000 and €30,000. Everything must be developed by designers and developers. This requires a (long) process to make an inventory of your exact wishes, turn them into sketches, then into final designs and finally into reality. This quickly takes several months.
Within Moodle, it is not possible to link a single section (or lesson component) to multiple e-learning modules. So if you want to reuse content you need to copy + paste, with the result that later applied changes also need to be made to all of the duplicated lesson sections. In short, you can't reuse the lesson material nicely.
Reuse of lesson material is very pleasant if you want to deliver a custom e-learning module for a specific customer. In the customised e-learning module you can link "generic/general" course material as well as a number of client-specific course material. If you make a change in the generic course material this will be changed immediately in all linked e-learning modules.
Imagine you now offer the e-learning module "VCA" in Dutch and you want to offer it in Polish as well. Moodle then works as follows: you download the course and then you can translate the content using XML files. You can then re-upload the course in Moodle. The drawback of this approach is (apart from the fact that it's quite a job) that you don't see the relationship between the course material and the translated course material in the administration.
You can always Procademysee the relationship between the subject matter and the linked translations. This allows you to keep an overview and you can also make changes to the various translations during a content modification.
With Procademy you can start right away and no investment is needed. You simply "lift" along on the success of our platform. Because there are tens of thousands of trainings on Procademy There is a budget to continuously develop and provide support. All new functionalities are made available to all customers. Think for example of interactive test forms, chat modules, competence management, SMS notifications etc etc. This way of working belongs to a "cloud" or "SaaS" solution. But perhaps most important: you don't have to worry about the look and feel, certified hosting, maintenance, security: you can focus 100% on developing good training!
