What do I need to use Moodle?
If you are in search of an LMS that is robust enough to handle all the employees of your organization, but still want to keep this implementation within your budget, you might have stumbled upon Moodle, an open source Learning Management System that offers different functionality to help shape the training strategy of your company. But what is necessary to implement Moodle in your company?”
Well, there are two different paths you can take to implement Moodle:
Build your own server and install Moodle
Pay a Moodle partner to implement it for you
Let’s make it clear from the beginning, in both options you will need time and money.
Build your own server and install Moodle
This option is for people with a more technical background willing to spend hours in setting up the server and installing Moodle from scratch.
You have different options for your server (or servers), but first you need to identify a few things, that will dictate the setup of your hardware:
Number of total users
Number of concurrent users
Type of learning material to share
HTML only
eLearning modules from authoring tools
Graphics
Videos
With this in mind, you can proceed to choose one of the following for your server:
Purchase a shared hosting space on a provider (not recommended, since it tends to limit your users’ bandwidth and, it access to your site can be very limited at times, depending on other sites that are hosted in the same server)
Purchase a Virtual Private Server: With this option, you have much more control over what is in your server, since you have access on a super-user level, which means you can control what gets installed on your server. This option significantly improves the user experience and among other advantages, it already comes with all the necessary web services to start building your site.
Physical server: For this option you can either pay a provider, who owns racks of servers and has the infrastructure to keep the servers safe and monitored, or, if you have this infrastructure at your facilities, you can choose to put the hardware together by yourself. Either way, this is for more technical people and/or more robust companies, since this type of servers often come with just the operating system, and installation of web services (such as apache) is necessary.
After having your server space allocated, make sure PHP7 (preferably) and MySQL are enabled, and install Moodle by either using the installatron app on your cPanel or by uploading the files via FTP to your server, then just follow the instructions until the installation is complete and start customizing!
Pay a Moodle partner to implement it for you
This is, perhaps, the easiest way to implement Moodle in your company.
There are several Moodle partners (Companies certified by Moodle) that have the server infrastructure to have multiple Moodle installations. At this point, you would only need to know the number of users accessing your platform.
But be careful, since the larger this number, the more expensive it can get.
However, this option will save you tons of hours on installation that you can easily be put into customizing Moodle to conform it to your branding standards, and you can start adding content right away!
