Moodle is an open-source, self-hosted Learning Management System used primarily by universities, K-12 school districts, and large enterprises that require full data sovereignty and a highly configurable training environment. First released in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas, Moodle is the most widely deployed LMS globally by installation count — serving over 300 million users across 240 countries as of 2024. Its feature set includes SCORM and xAPI e-learning standards support, a comprehensive quiz engine with branching and adaptive question logic, course forums, assignment submission and grading, cohort enrollment, and an extensive plugin marketplace for extending functionality. Moodle's primary advantage over WordPress-native LMSes like LearnDash is its purpose-built academic and institutional feature set. Its primary disadvantages are the steeper technical overhead of self-hosting, maintaining, and theming a separate PHP application from your main website.
Glossary entry