Getting to know Joomdle ...

Hi,

I've been supporting one of my non-profit clients who has been using JoomlaLMS for 4 years. It is a fine product, but the license pricing model is significant expensive (as we have about 1500 students now), and we are looking at alternative solutions, with Moodle being a primary contender.

We're heavily invested in Joomla and civiCRM, and I'm quite intrigued by Joomdle. From what I've been able to glean from the forums, it looks like Joomdle is a front-end wrapper for Moodle -- and that this can be used to wrap Moodle interfaces into our existing Joomla site's template. And if I understand correctly, Moodle can also be directly accessed by learning administrators who are building & managing courses and students.

Is the above correct?

Are there limitations to what student-facing content from Moodle can be presented to a student? That is, were I to install Moodle as a standalone platform, would students have access to Moodle features that they wouldn't if I used Joomdle?

Also, I see on the Joomdle downloads page there are plugins that allow one to use civiEvents to allow students to enroll in Moodle courses. Do these plugins work with the latest release of civiCRM? I see the plugins were created in 2015 and are at version 1.0.0, which suggests they've not been updated since 2015...

If the plugins are functional, do they handle rules like course pre-requisites, so students can't register for a Moodle course if they haven't completed required pre-reqs?

And -- does Joomdle support the latest release of Moodle (4.0.x)?
I'm sure I have many other questions, but this is a good start...

Hi.

Thanks for your interest in Joomdle. I will try to answer your questions.


> From what I've been able to glean from the forums, it looks like Joomdle is a front-end wrapper for Moodle -- and that this can be used to wrap Moodle interfaces into our existing Joomla site's template.


Well, not exactly. The main goal of Joomdle is to provide an integration platform between Joomla and Moodle.
Showing Moodle inside Joomla via iframe (wrapper) is just one of the features, and it is not mandatory to use.
In general, for education-centric sites, I prefer not to use it, and have Moodle show in its own window. But this is just a personal preference.

> Are there limitations to what student-facing content from Moodle can be presented to a student? That is, were I to install Moodle as a standalone platform, would students have access to Moodle features that they wouldn't if I used Joomdle?

No. You need to install Moodle the same as if you were using it as a standalone platform, so everything is there.

> Do these plugins work with the latest release of civiCRM? I see the plugins were created in 2015 and are at version 1.0.0, which suggests they've not
been updated since 2015...

Well, it seemed to work last time I tested less than a year ago. Look here, although half the thread is in spanish
www.joomdle.com/support/forum/social-ext...civicrm-plugin#23176

> If the plugins are functional, do they handle rules like course pre-requisites, so students can't register for a Moodle course if they haven't completed required pre-reqs?

Not really. From the link above:
This was developed as a proof of concept for a client that requested it and then vanished, and we just released what we had in case someone was interested. It seems nobody was.

> And -- does Joomdle support the latest release of Moodle (4.0.x)?

Yes.