Resources / FAQs

Moodle is an Open Source Learning Management System that is used by tens of millions people worldwide. Why?

Because Moodle is 80% more cost-effective and matches leading competitors feature for feature. Traditionally an open source software used by education institutions to provide distance learning for students—Moodle is now used by enterprises around the world for online training and learning.

As a highly flexible LMS, Moodle can be used to conduct courses online or to support face-to-face teaching, learning and training. It can also be extended with over 500 plugins for assignments, quizzes, grading, certification, and social and collaborative learning. To learn more about Moodle plugins visit our Moodle Plugins Guide

Moodle is an acronym for ‘Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment’ and was originally developed by Martin Dougaimas in 2002. Today Moodle has been adopted by over 230 countries where Moodle communities thrive. As an open source platform, Moodle users benefit from a global community of developers who are actively engaged in improving the user experience.

How can Moodle be integrated with school, university, or corporate IT systems?

Moodle can be integrated with online content resource repositories, enterprise solutions for managing course registration, payment and enrolment, course schedules, training resources, compliance management and student or employee records.

Furthermore, Moodle can be installed on any computer that can run PHP, and can support an SQL type database. Moodle runs equally well on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. As such, Moodle can be hosted on a variety of web hosting platforms. For optimal performance and user experience we recommend managed hosting services because they cost less than on premise hosting and are customized for your unique Moodle site.

Totara, or otherwise known as Totara Learn, is an open source talent and learning management system (LMS) that extends upon the core structure of Moodle for corporate, healthcare and government environments.

Totara, or otherwise known as Totara Learn, is an open source talent and learning management system (LMS) that extends upon the core structure of Moodle for corporate, healthcare and government environments. Released on the global market in 2011, Totara closed a gap that Moodle, an education-focused LMS, left wide open. Developers of Totara recognized the need for an open source learning management system that addressed the core requirements expected of a high-end corporate learning management system. Rising quickly to the top, Totara is ranked as one of 2014’s Top 20 learning portals worldwide by TrainingIndustry.com.

What Functionalities does Totara Add?

Tailored for the working professional, Totara Learn adds the following functionalities that enable corporate, healthcare, government and education clients like BMI Healthcare, McDonald’s and Tesco exceed their training and learning goals. What follows is a brief list of Totara’s added functionalities:

Competency based training and management
Compliance training and management.
Performance management
Role-based learning paths
Personal development plans linked to performance appraisals
Team learning management
Classroom management
Accreditation management
Sophisticated reporting
Open badges and certifications

Looking for help with Totara?

CONTACT AN EXPERT

Totara is offered on a subscription based model to save you from expensive licensing fees seen by proprietary solution counterparts. So how cost effective is Totara?

As an open source distribution of Moodle, the leading open source LMS, Totara follows the same release path as Moodle so that new versions are released every six months. With a comprehensive subscription model for enterprises of all sizes, Totara Learn will save you up to 80% more than leading competitors who lock you in with licensing fees. Hosting services aside, Totara can cost you as little as 11 cents per user depending on the size of your organization. When comparing the cost of on premise hosting, adding Totara managed hosting to your solution decreases the cost per user further.

How can Totara be integrated with corporate, healthcare, or government IT systems?

Totara LMS can be easily integrated with online content resource repositories, human resource management systems, workforce management systems, compliance management records and business intelligence software.

Furthermore, Totara can be installed on any computer that runs on PHP, and can support an SQL type database. Totara runs equally well on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. As such, Totara can be hosted on a variety of web hosting platforms. For optimal performance and user experience we recommend managed hosting services because they cost less than on premise hosting and are customized for your unique Totara site.

Can Moodle grow with my needs?

Moodle is designed to scale in terms of users, courses, geography, languages and bandwidth use. Currently the largest Moodle implementations serve more than 100,000 students or 20,000 courses. With the use of repositories, a well designed server architecture, courses and high bandwidth video streams can be used by large groups and across the world.

Who develops Moodle?

Moodle is supported by Moodle Partners who can assist you with hosting, installation, customization and development. The software is developed by a community of developers, educational technologists and Moodle HQ, under the guiding hand of founder and Lead Developer, Martin Dougiamas.

How does Moodle keep adding new functionalities for teachers, trainers, and learners?

Moodle is maintained by a core group of developers. New software versions are released twice per year, on June 30 and December 31. Details of maintenance and new development work are available to the public at tracker.moodle.org, and forums provide an opportunity to ask questions and discuss functions and features.

What is a Moodle Partner?

Moodle Partners are certified by Moodle HQ to provide Moodle services such as installation & support, hosting, training, customization and consulting.

All Moodle Partners contribute a percentage (10%) of their revenue to the Moodle Trust core developer fund in order to support their work. Vendors who advertise Moodle services without being Moodle Partners are not certified and do not contribute to the Moodle Trust for software maintenance and development.

How do I choose a Moodle hosting option?

Based on the number and types of courses and number of students you plan to serve we can help you choose the most cost effective solution.

On-premise hosting – If you have your own IT staff and you plan to appoint or hire a dedicated Moodle expert you can host and maintain Moodle on your own premises.
Managed Hosting – Many organizations prefer to outsource hosting to avoid investment in new hardware and in hiring and training extra IT staff. A Moodle Partner can provide hosting, maintenance and support services, and ensure up-time, speed, security, and backup procedures.

Can you Migrate Courses from a Different LMS to Moodle and Totara?

Having a good process in place is key to getting the job done with the best possible results in the least possible time. Lambda Solutions has helped many customers convert courses and we look forward to helping you make this as painless as possible.

Do you Provide Online Course Development?

While Lambda Solutions has developed online courses in the past and still has the expertise in house, we have decided to focus on Moodle and Totara implementation and customization. We will be glad to introduce you to our course development partner with whom we work together to provide our clients with a turnkey solution.

What Does a Moodle Implementation Cost?

One of the unique differences that you will find between Open Source Moodle versus alternative proprietary solutions is that there are no software license fees. This significantly reduces your Cost of Ownership (TCO).

What Does a Totara License Cost?

Annual subscriptions for Totara are priced by tier of users. Contact sales for more specific information.

Benefit from Partnering with Learning Management Experts

As cloud learning management experts, we come at the challenge of training and learning from a different perspective. Our roots are in education, and as former educators, we deeply understand the technical and operational challenges of organizational learning today.

We are here to ensure the success of your learning and talent development programs. The foundation for this success is a feature rich learning management system that enables you to deliver results-driven training and development opportunities within your organization.

Full Solution Provider

Lambda can provide you a full online learning solution which includes:

Leading Learning Management Systems: Moodle or Totara
LMS Hosting & Content
LMS Analytics & Reporting
Support and Training
Themes and Customization
Guidance to help your organization meet its learning and talent development goals

We are approaching twenty years of expediting efficient and speedy LMS implementations. This experience ensures your project is completed on time and within budget.

CONTACT AN EXPERT

Leaders in Open Source

Open Source Talent and Learning Management Systems are feature rich, flexible and secure giving you control & ownership to reduce your risk. By taking advantage of the financial gains of an open source you won’t be at the mercy of commercial software. Using open source is one of the fastest growing trends in IT today. And as open source experts, we understand the importance of extending functionality, integrating with other systems and giving back to the open source community with our advancements.

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Premier Totara Partner

Totara, a corporate distribution of Moodle, is a Talent Management System which extends upon Moodle’s capabilities including the ability to manage your organizational structure with:

Pre-defined or custom hierarchies
Learning plans
Performance appraisals
Many other features to support a blended learning approach

Better yet, Totara does this at about 20% of the cost of a commercial system matched feature for feature.

WHICH LMS IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

Learning Management System Reporting and Analytics

As thought leaders in talent and learning management, we recognized the growing LMS reporting and analytics gap. Organizations struggle to get the data and information they need about their learning and talent development programs. Reporting on online learning is challenging and completing basic queries is time consuming, costly and down right frustrating. Lambda fills this market gap with a unique solution, Zoola. Zoola provides administrators, managers and learners with incredible reports, dashboards and the ability to make ad-hoc queries on the fly giving you access to data quickly and easily.

EXPLORE ZOOLA

176

Implementations

172582

Learners

Experience & Expertise

We work with a growing number of healthcare facilities, corporations, schools, colleges, training institutions, and nonprofits who want to offer cost-effective Learning in the Cloud. We believe support is a critical component to any successful implementation. We offer migration, onboarding and training services in our support program.

With over 600 implementations and over 500,000 hosted learners, we are proud to offer a solution that will impact your learning and talent development programs at large.

Upgrades are provided as part of our Moodle/Totara hosting package.

Yes, we have experience in integrating into Drupal, Joomla, WordPress; student information systems like SIS and Banner; e-commerce platforms like Magento; data repositories like Alfresco; video streaming services like Big Blue Button and Kaltura; and ePortfolio solutions like Mahara.

When we use Totara and Moodle to deliver education and training, they become a key part of your organization’s brand experience. Because learning is often delivered to larger groups of students at the same time or at multiple remote locations, the ability to scale and deliver responsive online learning interactions is critically important. We manage your Totara and Moodle instances to make sure you can deliver consistent and fluid learning experiences, so you can focus on the outcomes.

Lambda Solutions has worked with Moodle since 2003 and we continue to invest in our people and technology to provide the best Moodle expertise and managed hosting services to meet the often unique needs of our customers. We believe in keeping Moodle open and support customers who host in-house, but we know we provide the best value to you when you host in Lambda Solutions private Moodle Cloud.

We make sure that you receive the quality experience and service you desire:

We start by certifying the latest Moodle version to make sure that it is stable and provides valuable improvements over the previous version.
We review the Moodle application plugins and take the same rigour to test and certify them to make sure they work well with the Moodle versions we support. We also provide you with a list of approved applications that we tried, tested and know deliver value to you.
We update and optimize our servers to make sure we get the desired performance and stability.
We select quality hardware that delivers high reliability, performance and scaling.
We design the back-up and restore process to meets your needs.
We monitor the performance of our systems. Our proactive maintenance process keeps pace with the growing installations.

We’re there when you need us. We provide responsive ticketing, email and telephone support, and we share updates via our Lambda Solutions support portal.

We work with your team to learn about your preferences in terms of involvement, customizations, integration, repositories, content distribution (CDN), streaming, conferencing, reporting and mobile use of your Totara or Moodle system.

Next, we help you plan data and course migration and training. We also bring in our Totara and Moodle experts to clarify specific needs, research specifics and help you choose the best path of action. Then we create a project team and schedule your implementation and once you sign off on the plan, we start our onboarding process to get you up and running and ready when you need to be.

We provide Shared Hosting for clients who have smaller Moodle installations and a limited budget.

This cost effective standard hosting environment provides all the basics and is quick and easy to implement. For larger customers who use Moodle as part of their business and want to be able to scale their Moodle rapidly and without limits we provide hosting on our Virtual dedicated servers that can be easily upgraded as user or course growth demands. Our virtual dedicated servers also offer the option for more customization and access to your Moodle instances if you are so inclined. For very large Enterprise class clients we develop custom implementations and a systems architecture to meet your specific needs.

Our servers are specifically configured to run Moodle optimally. Our managed hosting facility enables your organization to scale from 1,000 users to support up to 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 users in a virtual machine environment. However, if you require a dedicated hosted environment, Lambda is able to accommodate this requirement as well.

We typically install the latest stable version of *Moodle (3.x)*, however, there have been instances where the client specifically asks for earlier versions of the product, which Lambda can provision.

Yes. We continuously monitor the performance of our servers and offer an optimized, fully redundant and high availability hosting architecture that boasts an average of 99.99% uptime and less than two-second average server response time and a page response threshold of two seconds.

Yes.

As many as required by the client. However, Lambda recommends no more than 3 individuals.

We believe in providing customers with the autonomy to make decisions about their Moodle environment. In keeping with the spirit of open source a customer is able to explore and extend their Moodle system with plugins as determined by their needs. Though you are free to help with development, we are always here to assist you with customization and development of your system.

Frequently Asked Questions

Moodle is an Open Source Learning Management System that is used by tens of millions people worldwide. Why?

How can Moodle be integrated with school, university, or corporate IT systems?