THE BATTLE OF THE LMSs – Author: MOODLE VS GOOGLE Ivan Gjorgjievski, MSc A COMPARISON BY A MOODLE ADMINISTRATOR [email protected] Business Academy Smilevski – BAS, Skopje

With the onset of the global pandemic, it has Classroom, educators can create classes, distribute become clear even to the hardest opposer of using assignments, grade and send feedback, and see online teaching tools and platforms, that teaching everything in one place.” online is the future and the answer to the ever- This explanation is straight up taken from googles developing industry. In the first 3 months guidelines! If you are familiar with anything Google, of 2020, many educational institutions, universities, you’ll find that their philosophy within this product faculties, courses have gone online one way or follows the exact same guidelines: streamlined, another. Many are still trying to figure out their best extreme easiness of use, speed and efficiency. On way of implementing online tools within their first glance google classrooms makes the education plans, so this paper aims to show a administrative side of teaching a “two-clicks” away. comparison between two of the more popular Learning Management Systems (LMS): The The showdown: versatile Moodle and the new contestant Google MOODLE VS Classrooms. The goal of this comparison is to assist the reader in the decision on which way to go when choosing a suitable LMS system.

The versatile Moodle: Overview “Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single Category 1: Ease-of-Use! robust, secure and integrated system to create personalized learning environments.” Provided that the school of any kind is registered for the G Suite package, any teacher can create account and, almost immediately, begin sharing The above excerpt is materials, books, assignments and share with his taken directly from the official website of the students. With Moodle it is reported that sometimes Moodle organization that stands behind this open- it is difficult to navigate, especially when the front- source LMS platform (moodle.org). It is a highly end design is not done by a professional. flexible and fully customizable, all-in-one learning // Point: G Classroom. platform, which can be set up in a way that suits any size of an organization. It is designed in a way Category 2: Versatility that is fairly easy to use, has no licensing fees and This category is the one Moodle takes away without has a really strong community that continually any further considerations. G Classrooms are develop and improve the platform itself. lacking for instance: having personal servers and data security, , individual modifications The newcomer Google Classroom: Overview and adding your own plugins of any kind. Moodle, with it’s tremendous and magnificent community of contributors, developers, partners and users, has hundreds upon hundreds of additional functionalities that can be added to suit any needs. It’s true that the learning curve can be a bit steeper “…a streamlined, easy-to-use tool that helps teachers manage coursework. With here, but that is the price that is gladly payed when Classrooms comes as a full package at the start it makes educators lives so much easier. however there is no availability to add anything extra or self-developed. With this envelope G // Point: Moodle. Classroom offers their key values: speed, ease-of- use, cloud. Moodle, with its open system offers their key value: adaptability! So, let’s say both Category 3: Value for money contenders are tied at the moment. Let’s discuss Both contenders have their own free version. for a bit their levels of support. G Classroom is a However, as everyone already knows, nothing free product by Google, so it already has a strong is exactly free. While G Classroom is a free service, follower community, yet the support comes from a it offers very little functionalities in comparison with product forum as well as their Help Center with a other LMS. Moodle is a completely free open- troubleshooting section. Over the years, Moodle source download, which anyone with a bit of tech has built quite strong community of people, users, knowledge can easily setup, but anyone looking for professionals, teachers, students and researchers. using it has to have some kind of server either local Its forums are one of the more populated forums or web based. So, lets compare them with regards out there and there aren’t many questions left of what-you-pay-is-what-you-get. G Classroom is unanswered. Furthermore, a significant part of bug free, only cloud based, and its functionalities are fixes and improvements come from the users limited to courses and activities within them. themselves via their system. In the end, Moodle on Moodle is free to download for own local or web top of everything before has a wiki-like system of use, and also has a free web cloud option which is documentation which is consistently and constantly quite limited but still has more functionalities for updated with the latest fixes, tips, tricks, guides and smaller organizations than G Classroom. When anything moodle. Oh wait, there is the modularity considering organization sizes, both contenders do as well! Moodle offers the largest modular offer quite seamless scalability. Since this category robustness as an LMS which means anyone can is mainly subjective, considering it is a value have it just the way they like it. This all said, and determination, Moodle feels like a more robust and still haven’t mentioned the annual Moodle moots versatile and therefore brings much more value for happening anywhere in the world. Moots are a any money paid for the whole logistics setup. Yet, meetups which are the leading event in increasing G Classroom has few key features that Moodle moodle knowledge, experience sharing and does not provide natively, which shines a whole increasing use. new light to its value, so in this category the //Point: Moodle statement Is true: what you pay (or not) is indeed what you get. Final category: Shortcomings

// Point: both. If you want to truly consider and compare any LMS you have to look at the both sides of the coin. Let’s Category 4: Features and support see where they are coming short in providing Although in the previous category, the features options. Google classroom is not available for have been briefly discussed, here we are going to business, so there is no way you can make it your be measuring them side-by-side. Let’s take the key own and sell it as a service or package. features of both LMSs and put them to scale. Furthermore, if a parent or a tutor or someone Moodle has tons and tons of additional outside the schools wants to or needs to check the functionalities (see Moodle Plug-ins page on student’s grades, activities, attendance or anything moodle.org), and also comes pre-packed with regarding, there is no system offered for such anything a school will need in the long term occasion. Unlike Moodle, which provides this option basically. Via the website, you can add features with any modifiers needed. Yet, Moodle doesn’t such as gamification, video-conferencing, exams, allow for link sharing with any user outside the research, workshops and so on. By comparison G system, something which G Classroom offers and is left at the disposal of a teacher. The main shortcoming of Moodle that any administrator will attest to is the system size after it’s been used for some time. With its native scalability, Moodle sites if not monitored closely can easily become humongous and difficult and/or expensive to maintain. G Classroom on the other side is marketed as unlimited option for any size of users and activities. With that the burden of scalability is transferred on Google while with Moodle, that burden is on the shoulders of the system admins. The main shortcoming of G Classroom is that it is intended only to facilitate the offline learning process and doesn’t offer much more than that. In comparison, with Moodle many options and its robustness the learning can easily happen offline and online as well. A one example would be the use of any simultaneous gamification activities that can be added to any Moodle installation.

//Point: Moodle

Takeaway G Classroom is a young platform, and anyone that is familiar with Google, can easily expect it to grow exponentially, especially if there is an obvious feasibility for Google. Moodle, with its core functionalities that came from the necessity of teachers worldwide, have grown so much in the past decade and became so widely accepted which further proves its value in the education and business industry. Therefore, any other LMS contesting its functionalities will need to put down some serious effort.

Both contenders differ in their mission: The one aims to help teachers and students, the other aims to help the industry as a whole.

At the end, we are left to announce the winner of this showdown. With quite a subjective opinion and satisfaction the author declares Moodle as a winner by a point. (Moodle 4 – 2 G Clasroom).

Resources and links for further consideration

1. Moodle 2. Google Classroom 3. Software Advice 4. Trustradius