Meeting Corporate Collaboration, Training and Talent Management Needs with Workplace Moodle

Reading Corporate Learning with Moodle Workplace (Packt, 2020), by Alex Buchner, filled me with relief.  

There has never been any doubt that Moodle’s capabilities are ideal for any number of organizational needs, ranging from onboarding and compliance training, to collaborative projects across departments or locations. The problem for most people who want to use Moodle for their organizations is that most web-based Moodle templates are created for schools (primary and secondary) as well as colleges and universities. For someone who wants to have an on-premise solution, there will be a lot of customization to be done, and it’s easy to make a mis-step in the first few phases that lock you into something you don’t want, but it’s too expensive and time-consuming to change. To further complicate things, Moodle has frequent updates and upgrades, and if you’ve put a lot of effort into a custom solution for one version, you may not be too excited about experimenting with it to see if it will migrate to a later version. 

Thankfully, the enterprising Moodle community has developed Moodle Workplace, which is a Moodle build that has the structure and built-in activities for a wide array of workplace needs, which include on-boarding, training, certificates, bite-size training for badges, collaborations, compliance assessment, talent management records-keeping and more.  To give eager users the skills they need to use it, Alex Buchner has written a well-organized, clear, useable, and nicely documented book, Corporate Learning with Workplace Moodle https://www.packtpub.com/product/corporate-learning-with-moodle-workplace/9781800205345 . It is now available through Packt Publishing, an acknowledged world leader in technical training publications.

If you’re familiar with Moodle as it is used for an educational institution, you’ll immediately notice that some of the terms have been used to give the platform a business feel.  Individual users are “tenants” which evokes the feeling of a building with physical office space where you can arrange the workers. The decision by the makers for Workplace Moodle to trigger a visual image of a single building may be a bit ill-advised, given the distributed workplace and the very real possibility that post-COVID, many companies will choose not to pay high rents but will encourage working from home as much as feasible and practical. For Minecraft devotees, the open-world sandbox aspect is an exciting one, and the prospect of building a training and collaboration world with Moodle Workplace is exciting. 

Moodle Workplace does not replace Moodle. Instead it consists of a series of plug-ins that sit on top of the Moodle platform. In this sense, it’s a customization and the downside is that any inherent limitations in Moodle will be present in Moodle Workplace as well. Some of the plug-ins are Totara Learn-developed plug-ins, so if there are aspects of Totara that you do not like, you’ll need to learn to live with them, at least until Moodle 4.0, and then all bets are off. Another limitation is the fact that it’s not available for your own on-premise download. Instead, you must work through an authorized Moodle Partner. They can be expensive. 

That said, the biggest advantage of using Moodle Workplace vs another solution is a quick learning curve for Moodle users, customizable appearance, and rapid deployment. Further, Workplace Moodle has made an effort to integrate with other databases or systems. For example, many companies currently use AEP for their payroll functions as well as compliance, workforce development record-keeping. 

For a developer or instructional designer who is used to using Moodle with educational institutions, it will be intuitive to use Workplace Moodle to set up training modules that include the content as well as assessment. 

The self-enrollment function for both synchronous and asynchronous training events eliminates the need for associations and professional societies with external members to use something like EventBrite.  Being able to integrate the webconferencing function (Big Blue Button, for example), makes it possible to do everything from within Moodle and not have to exit in order to set up a separate meeting with Zoom, Teams, BlueJeans, RingCentral, etc. 

Buchner’s text goes into detail about how to set up the following: 

• training with assessment
• training with automatic generation of badges and/or certificates
• designing badges and certificates
• collaborative projects with team members from different groups / locations
• brand-building exercises

Buchner does not go into as much detail as he could about one of Moodle’s big advantages. Although the file sizes are limited, Moodle does and can function as a content management system as well as a learning management system. The choice whether to archive and create repositories in the cloud-based Moodle site, or to create a portal to one’s own storage / repositories is one that the user will make. But, the bottom line is the same:  Workplace Moodle (as well as regular Moodle) can help you map your training path and the objects used in conjunction with it, and to do so with maximum flexibility and re-useability.