Section 1.3. Feature Comparison

1.3. Feature Comparison

Moodle also stacks up well against the feature sets of the major commercial systems. I've been investigating alternatives to Blackboard and WebCT for over a year now, and I've been very concerned about feature compatibility between any alternative and the current systems. If instructors can't do what they've been able to do with their commercial system, they'll reject an open source alternative immediately. Moodle is the only open source system currently available that can compete with the big boys' features.

In fact, the educators in the developer community have given Moodle some features that the commercial vendors haven't even thought of. That's the advantage of an educator-driven, open source system versus a marketing-driven, for-profit system. In Table 1-1, I compare the features in the two leading commercial CMSs and Moodle.

Table 1-1. Feature comparison

Feature	Blackboard	WebCT	Moodle
Upload and share documents	Y	Y	Y
Create content online in HTML	N	Y	Y
Online Discussions	Y	Y	Y
Grade discussions / participation	N	Y	Y
Online Chat	Y	Y	Y
Student peer review	N	N	Y
Online Quizzes / Suveys	Y	Y	Y
Online Gradebook	Y	Y	Y
Student submission of documents	Y	Y	Y
Self-assessment of submission	N	N	Y
Student workgroups	Y	Y	Y
Lessons with paths	Y	Y	Y
Student Journals	N	N	Y
Embedded glossary	N	N	Y

You can see that Moodle already has all of the major features of the commercial systems, and a few that they don't. In the rest of the book, we'll discuss how you can use each of these features to enhance your teaching and provide your students with a powerful learning environment.