23 Aug Moodle plugins — Our Top 5 most popular

Moodle plugins help to extend your platform and build an LMS that works for you and your team.

Customisation is key when it comes to learning. All organisations are unique and so are their training requirements. By tailoring a learning management system (LMS) to meet your specific training needs and objectives, you can effectively upskill your people in a positive way.

Here, we will show how you can employ targeted Moodle plugins to maximise your platform and create a learning environment that works for everybody.

What is Moodle?

Moodle is one of the world’s most popular learning systems, with over 200 million users globally, and as an open-source solution, specialist developers have the freedom to build and extend on the original source code to introduce improvements and new features aligned with user goals and contemporary practice.

That’s exactly what our multi-award-winning Digital team have done over the past five years, building the ultimate Moodle (and Totara) plugin eco-system — Accipio One.

By employing our native Moodle plugins, our customers gain exclusive access to hundreds of extra features which are constantly evolving to address the real-world problems our clients face.

But what are the five most popular Moodle plugins that our clients have adopted as part of their learning solutions?

Let’s count them down for you, rounding them off with our most popular plugin in the number one spot!

5. Grade

Assessment is one of the key features of any digital learning platform, providing trainers and management with real-time data and visibility of the employee training performance.

While Moodle can handle simple marking scenarios brilliantly, when it comes to more advanced features, such as double-blind marking and auto-grade resolution, plugins are required to extend Moodle’s grading capabilities to the next level.

That’s why so many of our clients, including the Chartered Insurance Institute, have benefited hugely from adopting our Accipio Grade plugin.

Accipio Grade handles the Internal and External Quality Assurance (IQA and EQA) assignment processes end-to-end, allowing our clients to apply random sampling, multiple markers, conduct plagiarism investigations, and much more.

The plugin is perfect for handling individual submissions, or entire department or cohort submissions, and those all-important final grades can be accessed and exported easily with the click of a button.

Accipio Grade allows organisations and educational establishments to make huge savings in terms of process efficiency and massively cuts down the chance of accidental error during the assessment process – rare, we know, but why take the risk?

4. Discover & Curate

Creating an engaging, personalised, and collaborative training environment within a learning platform can be a huge challenge for organisations to overcome.

But with our Discover and Curate plugin, you can create an exciting and impactful educational experience that learners return to time and time again.

Investing in a learning platform is only the beginning. Companies must also explore ways to include engaging, relevant, and interactive course materials, gamification, and other collaborative or social tools to enhance learner engagement and participation.

Discover and Curate delivers it all and is incredibly popular with our clients, and notably – also with their learners. That’s because the plugin provides AI-generated recommended learning, automatically curated external content, dynamic blocks, and popular educational highlights.

Users can engage with content through bookmarking, liking, rating, and commenting, facilitating even greater personalisation of the user experience to match their needs and interests.

In-built AI features also provide 360 diagnostic skill scanning, and can recommend relevant content to the individual, based on their perceived strengths and weaknesses, in addition to their personal learning preferences.

Companies integrating Discover and Curate into their Moodle platforms can expect to see a huge uptick in staff usage and engagement and a clear improvement in their learning and performance.

3. Apprentice

Many organisations have become frustrated with the need for multiple platforms to deliver their training courses, apprenticeships, and qualifications.

Why not align them all in a single platform and save yourself all that stress?

Having to find a solution for each individual learning area creates higher costs, increased maintenance requirements, and a lack of system infrastructure cohesion.

But our clients are no longer feeling those frustrations. That’s because our Apprenticeship Management System (AMS) plugin for Moodle and Moodle Workplace can handle training delivery end-to-end, plus, so much more.

Through the AMS plugin, our clients are enjoying the benefits of workshop management, automation, tenancies, and custom pathways. Coaches and trainers can maintain contact logs, including formal progress reviews and workshop attendance.

In-built AI features provide 360 diagnostic skill scanning, with Individual Learning Plan (ILP) generation based on the perceived strengths and weaknesses of learners.

The AMS plugin also enables the construction and administration of multiple programmes, qualifications, and apprenticeship standards, with our exclusive qualification builder tool.

AMS has been a game-changer for so many of our clients, including HFL Education and Bradford College, providing them with the best parts of an e-Portfolio natively within the Moodle site, cutting their costs, reducing their maintenance, and creating a single source of truth for their training programmes.

2. Shop

Moodle wasn’t built for selling training resources – but many organisations find themselves wishing it had been.

Fortunately, our native ecommerce plugin, Shop, is here to help you unlock lucrative new revenue streams, while expanding the reach of your services.

Moodle has no in-built ecommerce features off-the-shelf. But many organisations come to us looking to bridge this gap on their learning platform. That’s because companies know they are missing a golden opportunity to generate additional and recurring income from their existing learning content, new membership tiers, event tickets, and much more. They understand that the true value and reward for all their hard work is not being realised.

But by converting their learning platform into a sophisticated online shopfront, companies can ensure they are maximising their return on investment.

Accipio Shop is built natively within Moodle, which eliminates the requirement for expensive third-party integrations, unreliable workarounds, and repetitive administrative processes.

The plugin handles single or recurring payments effortlessly, meaning our customers can simply and effectively monetise all the different types of products and services they offer.

Our client, HFL Education, benefited hugely from installing Accipio Shop, generating seven figures of revenue through the plugin within the opening ten months of going live. As a not-for-profit, HFL reinvested all this income directly back into educational initiatives throughout the UK.

1. Organisation Manager

It’s easy to think you might need a different training platform for each of your departments – after all, each team has its own set of responsibilities and different learning requirements.

But you would be mistaken.

With Moodle, you can simply and effectively consolidate your platforms into one place, cutting costs, saving time, and maintaining a cohesive company learning strategy.

That’s because Moodle has in-built multi-tenancy features. Multi-tenancy allows organisations to split their learning platform into departments, teams, or divisions, and provide tailored compliance training across a single installation.

Our Training Management System (TMS) plugin (TMS) is our most requested Moodle plugin and empowers our clients to extend site control to trusted multi-tenancy or client administrators, allowing them to self-manage at scale.

Our clients stay in ultimate control, but they can lighten the load by offsetting tasks to their various teams. These tasks can range from account creation, assignment grading, and user management to running custom reports and even customising the look and feel of the Moodle site.

While the organisation can maintain a single consistent learning platform, departments and teams have the flexibility to create a customised learning experience for their specific needs and the needs of their staff.

Our clients are reaping the benefits of TMS by cutting costs, saving time, personalising learning, and democratising their learning activities.
TMS is the perfect solution for large and ambitious organisations and fully justifies its place as our number one plugin.

Next steps

So, there you have it. Those were the most popular Moodle plugins with our clients.

Accipio One encompasses a wide range of plugin options that specifically target the real-world challenges faced by our clients. With new solutions being developed all the time, our clients can stay ahead of the curve and effectively tackle any obstacles that come their way.

All our plugins are compatible with Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace – the corporate distribution of Moodle – and the Totara TXP suite.

We are one of five Moodle Premium Certified Services Providers in the UK, offering Moodle Workplace, plus, for over a decade, we have also been a Totara Platinum Partner, in recognition of our dynamic people, expertise, and digital learning insights.

Our dual specialism across Moodle and Totara has allowed us to provide flexible solutions, across multiple platforms, to meet the unique requirements of our clients.

Want to unlock new possibilities on your Moodle site through Accipio One? We offer a free migration service! Get in touch to find out more.