Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer available to you (including webhosts). It can scale from a single-teacher site to a 40,000-student University.

The advantageous features of Moodle are as follows:
· It is open-source, with a rapidly growing worldwide developer community
· It ranks favorably with other leading proprietary systems in a number of independent evaluations
· It is easy to use, and is based on leading-edge educational research
· It is stable, robust, reliable and secure
· It can be easily customized for your particular requirements

Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU Public License). Basically this means Moodle is copyrighted. However, you have additional freedoms to use it. You are allowed to copy, use and modify Moodle provided that you agree to: provide the source to others; not modify or remove the original license and copyrights, and apply this same license to any derivative work.

Moodle will run on any computer that can run PHP, and can support many types of database (particularly MySQL).

The word Moodle was originally an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is mostly useful to programmers and education theorists.