We have selected some of the best Moodle Plugins for you!
There are hundreds of Moodle plugins out there, so a question we often have clients asking us is “Which are the best Moodle plugins?” When asked about the functionality that clients want to receive from Moodle plugins, more often than not, responses are better learning engagement and user experience. With over 12 years of experience configuring Moodle for organizations of every shape and size, we built up a strong understanding of the best Moodle plugins for your specific learning and talent development needs. This list is not exhaustive by any means, so if you are looking for plugins for other functionalities. Without further ado, here is our running list of the best Moodle plugins:
Best Moodle Plugins for Learning Engagement
- Team Builder lets you build teams based on a set of criteria. Rather than assigning students to random groups, Team Builder allows you to group students based on a set of questions of your choosing. It also has an effective drag-and-drop interface for building groups, helping you save a little time on the administration side.
- Dialogue lets students or teachers communicate in two-way private conversations or with all members of a particular group.
- Lesson Objectives shows current lesson milestones in the side bar (to both teacher and students) allowing the teacher to check them off as completed. What’s great is that you can enter a timetable, linked to different groups, so that objectives can be entered as far in advance as you want and displayed at a date/time of your choosing. Additionally, students can view all lesson objectives from past and future weeks to track what they have completed and tasks in the future.
- Face-to-face activities are used to keep track of in-person (e.g. classroom) trainings that require advance booking.
- Quickmail Block provides selective bulk emailing within courses allowing users to create drafts, send multiple attachments, include signatures and email by group and role filters.
- Invitation allows teachers to send personal course invitations to selected users by email.
- Webinar connects hosted webinars to Moodle by adding them as an activity to any course. This is intended for hosted Adobe deployments, not on premise deployments see here for more information.
Best Moodle Plugins for Course Presentation and User Experience
- The Book Module makes it easy to create multi-page resources with a book-like format. This plugin makes it easy for you to build complete book-like websites inside of your Moodle course, including chapters and sub-chapters.
- Collapsed Topics Module allows users to avoid ‘the scroll of death’ when a course has many topics, sub-topics and weeks.
- Checklist Module allows teachers to create a checklist for their students to work through. The teacher can monitor all the students' progress, as they tick off each of the items in the list. Items can be indented and marked as optional. Students are presented with a simple bar showing how far they have progressed through the required/optional items and can add their own, private, items to the list.
- Certificate creates PDF certificates/diplomas for students taking courses in Moodle and is completely customizable. You can add borders, watermarks, seals and even show grade information.
- Lightbox Gallery allows you to create, edit and delete image galleries within your Moodle course. Permissions can also be modified so that students can directly upload images to the gallery.
- Pcast makes it simple to create podcasts within Moodle. Podcast episodes can be instructor created or added by course participants.
- Accessibility Block allows users to customize Moodle to their visual needs. It supports changing of text sizes and color schemes. Settings can also be saved so that changes persist between sessions.
- Progress Bar Block is a time-management tool for students that visually shows what activities or resources a student is supposed to interact with in a course. Teachers select which pre-existing activities/resources are to be included in the Progress Bar and when they should be completed/viewed.
With hundreds of Moodle plugins created by the open source community, it can be a tad daunting to know where to begin in considering and selecting the plugins that will benefit your learners the most. Download this guide to learn about Moodle plugins for: self-paced learning, blended learning, online compliance training and more!
