Usage
Who uses Moodle?
Moodle is used by a variety of institutions and individuals, including:
- Universities
- High schools
- Primary schools
- Government departments
- Healthcare organisations
- Military organistions
- Airlines
- Oil companies
- Homeschoolers
- Independent educators
- special educators
How many Moodle sites are there
There are tens of thousands of registered Moodle sites in the sites list that we maintain; however it is impossible to know exactly how many Moodle sites exist because Moodle is open source, free to download and distribute, and doesn't force registration on its users. Very often we find people, will not inform us about their sites.
For up-to-date summary statistics about registered sites browse the Moodle Statistics page. Statistics shown on this page are updated daily to provide an accurate summary of collected information. You can also browse the Moodle Sites page, which provides a useful list of registered sites grouped by country for all sites that have chosen to make their information public.
How statistics are collected and maintained
Registration
All information collected by moodle.org is from site administrators that have registered their sites with us. For security and privacy reasons registration has been made a manual process that only a site administrator can undertake. Registration can be undertaken by clicking on the Registration button shown in the site administration block under Notification, and filling out the simple form that then gets sent back to us.
Sites can update the registration information we hold about them at any time them by repeating the manual process. It is important to note that because of the manual process information that is collected by moodle.org may be out of date.
Moodle since version 1.0 has allowed users to register their sites with us, registration being something that we encourage all publicly available sites to do. You can read more about registration, the registration process and what is collected on the Moodle Registration page.
Moderation
To ensure that the statistics that we collect are as accurate as possible there are certain conditions that a registered site has to meet in order to be included into both the statistics and sites pages.
When a site first registers we check the information about the site to ensure that the URL they have provided is valid and that the email address for the site administrator is a valid email address. We also at this point sanity check the information being collected to remove obvious test sites.
Maintenance
Like most of the web many sites come and go. Since we strive to maintain accurate statistics we need to check registered sites on a regular basis and clean out old data. A sophisticated, automated site check process is used to undertake the task of checking every registered site on a weekly basis.
In checking registered sites every sites is visited by our site check program that then evaluates and scores each site individually based on a collection of a number of defined rules that we have set to identify each and every Moodle release. The score that a site receives determines whether the site is included in the sites list or not. Any site that fails the evaluation is then removed from the sites list and not included in any statistics.
Ensuring your site passes the weekly evaluation
To ensure that your site passes the weekly evaluation check that your site meets the following three criteria.
- Check the URL you registered is the URL of your Moodle registration. We check only the page returned from the URL you registered, we don't dig down into your site, or search any alternatives.
- Check the site is publicly available on the Internet. We can't check your site if it is only available locally, or has been wrapped in any means of authentication.
- Ensure you have content when you register your site. If you don't have any content when you register it is likely we will dismiss your site as a test site. Ensure that you have created at least one course, and three users within your installation before registering.
If you want to find out when we last came through you can check your personal site statistics or web server logs and look for page requests on your registered URL that have the following user agent moodle.org Link Checker (http://moodle.org/sites/)
