Free moodle software for linux

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses. Such e-learning systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLE). One of the main advantages of Moodle over other systems is a strong grounding in social constructionist pedagogy.
Moodle is Open Source software, which means you are free to download it, use it, modify it and even distribute it (under the terms of the GNU General Public License). Moodle runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Netware and any other system that supports PHP, including most webhost providers. Data is stored in a single database: MySQL and PostgreSQL are best supported, but it can also be used with Oracle, Access, Interbase, ODBC and others.
Moodle has 50 language packs, including: Arabic, Catalan, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (UK and US versions), Finnish, French (France and Canada versions), German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Maori, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.
Main features:
- Overall design of Moodle
- Site management
- User management
- Course management
- Auto-linking
- Mathematics notation
- Media plugins
- Multi-language content
- An "Upload File" assignment
- An "Offline" assignment
- A "Repeating" chat with public session logs
- A "Open" chat event
- A Choice with anonymous results
- A Choice with non-anonymous results
- A Choice that allows you to update anytime
- A Standard forum for general use
- Each person posts one discussion
- A single discussion
- Teacher-Defined Glossary
- Learner-Defined Glossary
- A glossary of common terms
- A graded journal
Enhancements:
- The four big headline features are Roles (a complete new architecture for assigning people permissions), the XML database schema (which now supports a wider range of databases), a new admin interface (designed to make it much easier to find settings and configure Moodle properly), and the Unit testing framework (which allows developers to write unit tests that can be run as part of a system check to make sure Moodle code is performing as expected).

Roster-in-a-Box project is a course management system designed to facilitate the use of autograded homework assignments, while also allowing for text-based questions to be submitted online and graded online by the instructor. I developed and currently use the system for my introductory statistics and microeconomics courses at Long Island University, and I have had it in production since 2005. While you will be able to break the program if you try hard enough, it is stable and very much ready for use.
I wrote the program because I wanted something simpler than Moodle (and also because my school was not supporting Moodle at the time that I started the project). I love Moodle, and Moodle may be right for you, but it wasnt right for me, because I didnt want the course management system to take over my course web site. Basically, Roster-in-a-Box handles the homework and grading functions with a couple of web pages and leaves you on your own to design the rest of your course web site. That may or may not be what you want.
It should be quite simple to take my statistics modules (and the forthcoming microeconomics modules that I just havent gotten around to packaging) and get your own introductory statistics course up in no time. It is also quite simple to set up a course that consists of only text-based, manually-graded questions. On the other hand, if you want to write auto-graded assignments for some other purpose, you will have to know how to code them yourself. The structure of the modules should be somewhat self-explanatory to experienced programmers, but is probably daunting to those who do not know how to code. The entire program is written in PHP, and uses MySQL as a back-end database.
Version restrictions:
- There are things you could do while editing the assignment list that would leave it in an inconsistent state. For example, if you leave a page open, then open up a different page and make edits in that page, and then go back to the first page and save your changes, you may screw things up. I will get around to fixing this problem at some point, but in the mean time try not to do things like that.
- The program uses the PHP session variable, which by default times out after 24 minutes (supposedly due to security concerns). You should bug the web site administrator to lengthen the PHP system setting session.gc_maxlifetime to be as long as possible.
- By default, the system resets to the Spring semester on January 1st, the Summmer semester on May 15th, and the Fall semester on September 1st. I should probably make these dates editable somewhere in site_settings.php, but instead youll have to dig through administer.php and homework.php if you want to change them.
Enhancements:
- This has been used in a production environment for two years now, but the code has never been released.