I want to create a ‘hobby’ online learning platform to teach a craft I am passionate about. Ideally, I would like each student to have their own preferences and create a custom learning journey just for them. I would like all learning to be self-guided. My focus should be on creating the courses/content itself.
To elaborate, for the sake of illustration, let us say I want to teach carpentry (not my intended application). I want to have a module for each skill (e.g. measuring, cutting, sanding, varnishing etc.). During learning of each skill, there will be ‘exercises’ focusing on that skill. Skills will be in tiered levels and may have per-requisites. When you have sufficient skills, you can also try ‘projects’ that combine multiple skills (e.g. make a stool). Student should be able to pick the module or project they want to work on. I assume all of this is pretty straightforward.
But what I want to have is to have ‘tags or filters’ for each module/exercise/project which you can choose based on your interest (e.g. artistic woodworking, furniture making, architectural woodworking etc.) and the tools you have (specific hand tools, specific machine tools). Or the student pics a project and all modules required for that get added to their learning plan.
Based on this, each student should get a custom ‘course’ that combines the modules, exercises and projects that best suit their preference and available tools. This part I could not figure out if Moodle or other system could do out of the box.
I am curious is an opensource platform like Moodle would work for me. If not, is there a better alternative? Because it is a ‘hobby’ project, expensive ‘corporate LMS’ solutions are not really an option. I would like to say I am reasonably competent about hosting/maintaining online applications.
I would really appreciate your help and showing me some direction on this.
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Hi Tonny 
You have two options to make this work in Moodle.
Option 1: Create every possible combination of modules/activities/exercises as unique courses. The learner selects their filters and enrolls in one option.
Option 2: Create all modules/activities/exercises as individual courses. The user picks and enrolls in modules/activities/exercises based on their filters. They will have multiple options, with each option being its own course.
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So 1) for your idea: I think it was a big dream for a while to come up with these kind of learning blocks, that are in a way stand alone and then you can combine them, depending on what the learners needs or wants. However, in my experience you often loose the context which is from my perspective quite important to make the learner understand WHY they need this specific skill or behaviour. So if you want to enable them to build a table, I would put this as an end goal and tailor the sessions that lead to that goal accordingly. This doesn’t mean they would not able to build a chair later on, but you use the table to make it tangible. Especially for adult learning I think this is quite important to gain interest and keep the motivation.
Regarding Moodle: There hosted Moodle pages out there, which make it easier to start with. In general Moodle can do more or less everything you can imagine. In your specific case Moodle I see various functions that could help you:
- Course categories: Allow you to group courses to specific topics
- Tags: Allow you to tag courses and also individual learning objects with a specific skill, topic, etc.
- Competencies: Allow you add courses and learning objects to an overarching competency goal
- Access restrictions: Only make specific learning objects visible to a learner upon completion of another learning object
- Enrol course completed: Extension to automatically enrol users in a new course once they completed another
- Sub course: Extension which allows you to group the grading from multiple courses and create a summary grade.
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Thank you for your comment. I think my current thinking is leaning close to your option 2 but also somehow include a structure (category or a program) that offers some pre-combined courses/lessons.
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Hey check the enrollment plugin called “programs for moodle”.
If i understand correctly it is what you are looking for.
I don’t know if i can put a link here.
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Moodle could work for your needs but might need some customization to make it fit exactly what you’re envisioning you might wanna check out other platforms like Teachable or Thinkific too
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Moodle could definitely be a strong candidate for what you’re looking to achieve. Here’s some potential downsides you may want to be aware of though:
Custom Learning Paths: Moodle does allow for some level of personalized learning paths, but the kind of tagging and filtering system you’re envisioning—where students can pick projects based on interest areas like ‘artistic woodworking’ or available tools—might require additional plugins or custom development.
User Experience: While Moodle is powerful, it’s not always the most user-friendly right out of the box. Given that your focus is on content creation rather than tech management, you might find yourself spending more time tweaking Moodle than you’d like.
You Can’t Migrate Off It: It’s easy to start (aka free) but getting your content or data off the platform, if you decide to change platforms is an absolute pain in the ass
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Why do you think migrating from Moodle is worse than from other systems? For Moodle → Moodle you have the course backup/restore.
Migrating to another system is always a pain I would say, unless there’s an overarching standard for complete course backups that I’m not aware of. At least with Moodle, if you have the experience (or hire someone who has) using direct DB access or the API allows you to export all that data in formats that you could tailor to what the destination platform needs.
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Moodle usually requires a lot of technical know-how or the need to bring in a specialist to move away from the system, whereas some other systems will either help you move or it’s more exportable.
But you’re right that it’s always a bit of a pain.
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