Moodle: Open Source Course Management System
Moodle, developed using PHP, is an open source Course Management System. The stakeholders of the system are : Teachers, students and the web admin responsible for handling the course website. As the name implies, through Moodle it is possible to design course specific website through which students can access the course materials, submit assignments even listen to the course lectures. So it is not only helpful for the students but also for the teachers to manage and organize their course specific tasks. Here there are several modules which can be used to standardize the teaching/learning management system. In short some of the modules are:
Assignments: From teachers perspective: he/she can insert assignments, set the deadline, assign the group per assignments, can indicate whether the assignment can be re-submitted etc. Students can visit the site to get the assignment details, submit the assignment etc.
Chats: Students Real-time synchronous discussions on the course.
Choices: Can be thought as a poll. Teacher ask a question (may be a research problem) and provide multiple choices. The statistics of the choice result can be used as the data for any specific purposes. Or it can be used as taking decision considering all students consents.
Forums: A forum discussing on several topics about the course.
Glossaries: Students and teachers can create glossary/dictionary of related words from the course.
Quiz: Quiz module allows the teacher to design quiz on the course with the answers true-false. Can be thought of as a quiz test.
Resources: Teachers can upload course materials: slides, audio lectures, external resources etc.
Workshops: Several student groups can participate in the workshop and evaluate each others projects. There are some other modules are also there. The best part is that: through Moodle teachers can set up several types of activities; students participate in the activities and be graded. Teachers can easily track down the students activities and grades. In spite of all these centralization of the course materials: course presentation, assignments etc is done which is the maximum benefit I think.