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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle Moodle is designed to help educators create online courses with opportunities for rich interaction. Its open source license and modular design means that many people can develop additional functionality, and development is undertaken by a globally diffuse network of commercial and non-commercial users, spearheaded by the Moodle company based in [|Perth, Western Australia]. In plain English, moodle is a cool web tool that allows you to provide various resources, activities and technologically oriented interactions for your students.
 * What is Moodle?**
 * Moodle** is a [|free software]/[|open source] [|e-learning] platform //(also known as a Course Management System (CMS) or Virtual Learning Environment ([|VLE]))//. It has a significant user base with 18,204 registered sites with 7,270,260 users in 712,531 courses (as of [|November 15], [|2006]) [|[1]].

Pedagogical approach
The stated philosophy of Moodle [|[5]] includes a [|constructivist] and [|social constructionist] approach to education, emphasising that learners (and not just teachers) can contribute to the educational experience in many ways. Moodle's features reflect this in various design aspects, such as making it possible for students to comment on entries in a database (or even to contribute entries themselves), or to work collaboratively in a [|wiki]. Having said this, Moodle is flexible enough to allow for a full range of modes of teaching. It can be used for simple delivery of content (e.g. HTML pages) or assessment, and does not necessitate a constructivist teaching approach. Constructivism is sometimes seen as at odds with accountability-focused ideas about education, such as the No Child Left Behind Act ([|NCLB]) in the [|United States]. Accountability stresses tested outcomes, not teaching techniques, or [|pedagogy], but Moodle is also useful in an outcomes-oriented classroom environment because of its flexibility.

Origin of the name
The word //Moodle// is actually an acronym for //Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment//, although originally the M stood for "Martin", named after [|Martin Dougiamas], the original developer. [|[6]] Moodle sounds much like the verb //noodle//, which describes the improvisational process of doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an online course.