How To Set Up Your Own eLearning Business Using Moodle?

Moodle as an LMS was initially built for purely eLearning purposes. However, eLearning has revolutionized over the years, and the different ways of going about it have transformed.

There has to be continuous improvement with changes in learning needs. It’s the only constant.

Even though Moodle™ was supposed to be used primarily for course creation, student management, and course delivery, it has become much more powerful and feature-rich.

 

Can You Create Moodle eLearning Business?

The short answer to the question is – Yes!

Moodle LMS is great for creating course content and teaching as well as evaluating your learners, similar to what you would do in an online class. In addition to this, the vastness of this system makes it the perfect LMS to support your online learning business needs as well. This is because Moodle can also be used for selling courses through PayPal.

However, this functionality is not enough given how globalized education has become, especially post the COVID19 pandemic. So, selling Moodle courses via WooCommerce is an effective way to address this limitation.

However, the platform has certain limitations that need to be respected when it comes to setting up a full-fledged Moodle e-learning business.

Suppose you want to establish an efficient eLearning business on your Moodle platform, with all the required functionality in one place but don’t have the bandwidth to execute it or can’t afford to blow your budget by outsourcing the critical tasks. In that case, it’s a good idea to build your own, fully-functioning Moodle e-learning business website from scratch.

 

Moodle eLearning Business Benefits

We already know that Moodle works extremely great for the education sector. And given how modular the LMS is, it can be tweaked and supported by several other in-house as well as external premium plugins to turn it into an efficient business.

Why should you do this? Let’s take a look at some of the top benefits:

• Money and resources saved that would otherwise be spent on setting up a dedicated eLearning business site on a new platform.
• Your online training activities are always in sync with your eLearning business.
• Time saved, and the extra hassle of migrating or synchronizing courses on some other platform is avoided.
• Tracking and reporting become easier and more efficient – very critical from a business perspective.
• A variety of integrations and plugins are available to simplify and support your eLearning activities and keep your business going strong in the long run.
• Community assistance, add-on features, and regular updates can help your eLearning business on Moodle to grow at all times.

Overall, it’s a great way to build a good reputation with valuable course content and generate a stable income source.

 

How To Create Complete eLearning Business In Moodle?

Moodle LMS is quite flexible and massively multipurpose when it comes to creating and running courses to set up a good environment conducive to eLearning. The vast directory of free plugins and high functionality blocks make the LMS easily extendible to give your learners a sublime online learning experience.

But if you want to go beyond regular course creation and teaching to start a Moodle eLearning business without the expertise and without switching to a completely different LMS, it’s always beneficial to have an all-in-one kit of powerful plugins set up in an easily accessible way.

This will help you convert your “only-teaching” Moodle platform to a smooth-running eLearning business, where course creation, overall administration, course selling, user management, LMS reporting, grading, and a lot more can happen effortlessly.

To achieve this, having the Edwiser SuperTeacher Kit can help a great deal.

 

Using Moodle To Set Up eLearning Business

Integrating a complete Moodle business kit such as the Edwiser SuperTeacher Kit with your LMS helps you to access a whole new set of options and will let you do the following:

• create, manage and run your courses effectively
• manage your users easily
• smoothly administer your LMS
• track key LMS engagement metrics and analyze overall performance
• sell your courses on an automated e-commerce platform
• Grade better and faster

To put things in perspective, let’s say you have a training company, and you use your Moodle LMS as a training administrator and as a course content creator. Your job includes managing the training programs, enrolling learners, tracking their performance, creating courses, and managing them.

But to set up a well-oiled, smooth-running Moodle eLearning business on your own, you would need additional tools to take care of other aspects of Moodle.

 

Make Moodle Interface Simple & User-Friendly

You will have to customize your platform in a way that will help you create a cleaner and simple-to-use interface for your students and teachers in your company/training academy etc.

You will want to customize the design and how courses are structured so that your students can easily understand the course offerings, course navigation, and what it contains without putting in a lot of effort.

A professional-looking Moodle theme can help you simplify the interface. It gives you more flexibility to effortlessly change up the look and feel of your LMS without any external help. It also eliminates any dependency on developers, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time and money doing customizations.

A good Moodle theme can single-handedly help you easily customize the platform to hide the unnecessary features, create attractive login pages, design customized homepages or other landing pages, and change the aesthetics as per your company’s branding to make the platform look sleek and modern.

Edwiser RemUI theme and Edwiser Course Formats will help you achieve these objectives. Both these tools are a part of the Edwiser SuperTeacher Kit.

 

Sell Moodle Courses On Enhanced eCommerce Platform

Going beyond course creation to monetize them is paramount to earn significant profits. But how you go about the process of course selling is equally important.

Setting up an automated eCommerce system on WordPress-based WooCommerce and syncing or organizing your best-selling or popular Moodle courses is one of the most optimized ways to earn continuous income.

This is recommended as access to WooCommerce opens Pandora’s box of possibilities to earn recurring income in different ways.

You can easily achieve this by selling courses as WooCommerce products, subscriptions, memberships, or variable products. You already know how powerful WordPress is, and the benefits of Moodle-WordPress integration are worth considering this option to establish a stable e-commerce platform to sell your Moodle courses.

The first step is to integrate Moodle with WordPress using the Edwiser Bridge Pro plugin also included in the Edwiser SuperTeacher Kit. As a result, all of the selling takes place uninterrupted on your WordPress site that is seamlessly connected to your Moodle LMS.

NOTE: Edwiser Bridge Pro consists of Edwiser Bridge and four more Moodle eCommerce extensions. So, the extra work of going back and forth between Moodle and WordPress is avoided.

 

Improve Reporting In Moodle

Moodle is awesome when it comes to its flexibility, open-source nature, and large community support. But reporting and analytics offered by the LMS are quite complex not only in terms of usability but also in terms of aesthetics.

The Configurable Reports block is quite effective, but it’s definitely not sufficient for providing actionable insights.

So, you will also need a good reporting plugin to see the obvious engagement levels on your LMS, how your learners are interacting with the course content or eLearning activities and how your courses are performing. It will also help you decode engagement patterns on your Moodle site and make decision-making easier for you.

Information such as has the student completed the course, if so, then on what date did they manage to complete the course, their grades, whether or not the certificate is issued to the student, etc.

If you are a Moodle admin, you would want to see the overview of how all the students are performing, in general, to understand the overall course completion rate, along with the other details mentioned above.

As a Moodle teacher or manager, you would be more inclined towards knowing the overview and the option to search for a particular student and understand their progress and activity in the course.

Therefore, a good Moodle reporting plugin should let you see critical data points that give you a clear idea of your active users, course enrolments, and course completions through better graphics and easy-to-read data. This way, you can effortlessly make sense of learner behavior and your course performance.

 

 

The Edwiser Reports plugin bundled in the Edwiser SuperTeacher Kit is designed to make reporting actionable and presentable or easy to consume. Moreover, the plugin even helps you create comprehensive custom reports, schedule a report, hide the view of a block or easily change capabilities.

 

Optimize Moodle Grading

If you plan to attempt grading in Moodle using the traditional free plugins available in the directory, there are plenty of extensions for you to work with. In case you find the process taxing or overwhelming, you can also opt for the paid grading tools to simplify your grading and make it faster and more efficient.

One such plugin is the Edwiser RapidGrader which offers an intuitive grading layout. It gives you the option to ditch the hassle of repeatedly going through or checking multiple tabs to evaluate the answers of your learners.

 

 

All the responses recorded by a specific student appear collectively in an organized manner on one single screen or window, making it convenient for you to grade them.

The plugin also gives you the ability to grade essay-type or paragraph-based questions. There is a Question-based grading option, too, which allows you to evaluate one particular question attempted or answered by multiple students.

This way, you could grade one select question for several learners at a time and check how each one of them has answered the same question giving you enough clarity on the level of understanding of every learner who has responded to it.

You can use one of two methods to grade effectively in Moodle. You can even share constructive feedback with your learners using the feedback box available in the plugin.

 

Simplify Form Building In Moodle

There are several tools and plugins to create forms in Moodle. But, choosing the right form-building tool for your Moodle LMS is predominantly based on the kind of information you wish to collect.

Let’s say you want to know who filled out a particular form on your Moodle site based on login, at what time, and all the field data entered by your learner or customer. You can use a couple of in-house Moodle plugins such as the Feedback Module or the Dataform Activity to achieve this.

The Feedback Module can help you identify the submitters and link their answers to their names along with the exact date and time when they filled out the form.

You can configure this in a way that you can receive emails whenever someone has submitted a form. The email essentially shows you the name of the person who has attempted the form and also has a link to the feedback or information entered. This link takes you to the Moodle course on your LMS, where you can view all the data submitted by your learners.

Suppose you are running a robust Moodle eLearning business responsible for efficiently managing and monetizing/selling a wide range of courses you offer. In that case, it’s fair to say that you would be expecting a higher volume of interactions of learners or customers with your LMS.

So, it is advisable to capture relevant data via well-constructed forms. And creating meaningful form flows to ensure data collection, as well as storage, is well-organized.

Here are the benefits of having a good, working form solution for your Moodle eLearning business:

• Make a note of your site visitors’ or users’ interests
• Collect constructive feedback from your learners
• Help you with faster enrollments in your courses
• Provide quicker on-site support
• Easily create custom forms with fields of your choice based on your eLearning and business needs
• Getting visitors or users subscribed to your blog or weekly newsletter
• Build different forms for different purposes, such as Course Feedback Form, LMS/Moodle site Feedback Form, Surveys, etc.

To streamline your eLearning business in Moodle, you can invest in a good, drag-and-drop form solution with multiple templates, such as Edwiser Forms. It will help you create different types of forms, including custom forms to comply with your course as well as your e-business requirements (without any coding).

 

Conclusion

That was a list of plugins that can collectively come together to help you set up your own Moodle eLearning business all by yourself. Therefore, having a dedicated Moodle business kit is advisable and would be a good investment as it makes the whole process a lot easier + smoother.

You can try out the kit to transform your Moodle LMS into a sustainable e-learning business solution on your own that develops and grows efficiently in the long run without any external dependencies or support.

 

PS: Edwiser Site Monitor is another free plugin that is a part of the SuperTeacher Kit to help you analyze the health and performance of your Moodle site in general.

If you are a Moodle admin trying to understand why your LMS has slowed down, this plugin can help you diagnose the root cause of the problem. It will also provide you with the right statistics to overcome the issue. Information such as memory usage, CPU usage, storage usage, etc. All be displayed in one place via this complimentary plugin.

 

 

AUTHOR BIO: Kiran is a content marketer for Edwiser at WisdmLabs. She creates resources and informative blogs for Moodle. Edwiser is where you can find everything that simplifies Moodle, from plugins to tutorials to guides and more.