Moodle Unveils Free Cloud Hosting for Educators
Moodle today introduced MoodleCloud, a service that allows anyone to deploy the Moodle learning environment for free — with no installation or hosting charges. Intended for individual classes of up to 50 users and other small learning environments, MoodleCloud provides the latest version of Moodle software (2.9.1), including integrated Web conferencing, delivered via Amazon Web Services.
"Moodle's mission has always been to help educators improve learning with open, accessible tools to use as they wish," said Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and CEO. "Our Moodle Partners take care of many thousands of institutions and individuals worldwide with second-to-none services, and through their royalties they continue to fund Moodle in achieving our mission. Today we launch MoodleCloud, for teachers and trainers with small needs and even smaller resources to quickly and easily set up their own learning environment direct from the people making Moodle. Education is the foundation of nearly every important thing we do on this planet, and I'm proud that Moodle is able to offer alternatives for everyone from the largest university to now smallest individual classroom with MoodleCloud."
According to the company, MoodleCloud site administrators can manage multiple courses, add content, enroll users and use Moodle's collaborative learning activities within the learning environment. Since it's a cloud service, MoodleCloud automatically updates to the latest Moodle release.
Key features include:
- Free hosting (supported by advertising);
- Instant signup via mobile phone;
- Full version of Moodle with minimal limitations;
- Up to 200 MB disk space;
- Unlimited courses, unlimited database size;
- Integrated with BigBlueButton for free videoconferencing (supports up to 6 users with full video, audio, whiteboarding and presentation capabilities);
- Ability to personalize and customize a Moodle site;
- Available in more than 100 languages with multilingual capability; and
- Full support enabled for the Moodle Mobile app.
For more information, head to the Moodle site.
About the Author
Rhea Kelly is editor in chief for Campus Technology, THE Journal, and Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].