Moodle is a software tool for producing Internet-based courses and web sites. It was designed and written by Martin Dougiamas of Perth, Western Australia, to support a social constructionist framework of education. Mr Dougiamas has a background in technology, but is now combining his former career with his new one in education. As a part of this, he has developed Moodle, based on his knowledge about the nature of learning and collaboration.
The word Moodle is an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is useful for programmers and education theorists. It's also a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering through something, doing things as it occurs to you, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. This process applies to the way Moodle was developed, and the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course.
Moodle allows us to present a course containing information resources (textual and tabular information, photographs and diagrams, videos, audio recordings, web pages, acrobat documents and many others) and student activities such as uploadable assignments, quizzes, user polls, forums and others.
Yes indeed. Moodle is the mechanism by which learning material and assessed activities are delivered, but the course instructors are deeply involved in the design and delivery of the course. Whenever you upload an assignment, or complete a journal entry in response to a task that has been set by the tutors, one of the teaching staff will read your submission, grade it, and give you some feedback to help improve your work (if you need it). Tutors also take part in any forums that may exist in a course, so you can ask them questions, and discuss matters with them. In addition, other students that are also enrolled in the course may take part in discussions, so collaborative efforts may be developed.