Moodle has been a tremendous boon for schools and associations looking to pull away from the grips of enterprise LMS vendors over the last few years.

It’s also been a nice entry point for those wishing to dabble in elearning for the first time.

While it has both is fans as well as its detractors, it clearly has its place.

That said, we feel there is significant room for improvement in a number of areas especially in the Social or Informal Learning side.

Clearly, Moodle Forums Wikis, Projects and Chat are good avenues for collaboration or discussion.

We decided to extend that however, to make a much more contemporary experience for the students both in functionality as well as in the general user interface.

We’ve integrated a number of external social networks into the platform, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and even Twitter. Our clients can enable / disable whichever ones they chose, and the students can use any of the enabled sites to extend discussions with authorized peers.

Very shortly we’ll be significantly extending this functionality even further by establishing fully integrated social networks around a course. They’ll be somewhat similar to LinkedIn or Facebook itself however be completely internal and limited to the students and instructors of a particular course.

Moodle Themes are fine for some, but we’ve significantly modified the user interface. We’ve made it much cleaner and easier to navigate using a mac-like like format and even integrated an optional iphone like cover-flow for catalogues and course material.

We feel we’ve made tremendous progress so far, and in the next few months a great deal more.

Clearly, not everyone can invest the time and effort to do this with their Moodle site. Unless everyone works for free at your organisation, you’d probably have to invest many hundreds of thousands of dollars to do what we’ve done. (We know this one from experience.)

Whether you are looking for a eLearning software solution, or simply looking for ideas about what you can do with your own site, feel free to request a full demonstration at http://www.interactyx.com/eLearning/Request-Information.html.

We’d also love to hear from you about what other extensions you feel world enhance your learners experience. See more about what TOPYX has to offer at www.interactyx.com.