http://www.moodlenews.com/hosting/

You’ll find information on limits, basic plans, business plans and notes about the various variables we’ve found to differentiate the sites.  You’ll also see which are Mobile-enabled already (a few).  We’ll keep this up to date and edited as new resources become available and current hosters change their services.

Now there’s really no excuse to not take the Moodle plunge.

Moodleshare originally was a social sharing site where you could post information about open Moodle courses and sites so that other Moodlers could find them and the community could grow from the experience.  The original site is still active and available at http://moodleshare.com/.  According to the hosting site, Moodleshare

will host your courses for you if you are unable to grant guest access through your school or organization.

This site also hosts several open courses available to use in your own classroom or on your own Moodle install.

URL: http://courses.moodleshare.com/
Description: course sharing site and teacher testing ground
Ads?: no
3rd party plug-ins: no
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: NA
Business plan: NA
Limits: objectionable or large uploaded files may be removed/blocked
Basic Plan: one course, space available for open/shared courses

Today I’m going to cover (I hope without bias) GlobalClassroom.us, where I cut my teeth on Moodle in 2007.  GlobalClassroom provides hosting and hosting services to Moodlers and teachers looking for online classroom solutions.  It’s been through several iterations (1.0, beta, 2.0, and now “Cirrus”) which all provide a unique twist on Moodle hosting in that,

1. teachers can create and delete their own courses
2. all users enter the system to their personal “portfolio” page.  Similar to myMoodle
3. 1-code base with a layer of individual, brand-able, separate networks provide differentiation between schools
4. telephone and email support.

While at GlobalClassroom I worked to provide Moodle throughout Pennsylvania, California and Vermont (while living in each state from 2007-2010) where I participated in local tech-conferences like CUE [http://cue.org] and Vermont Fest [http://www.vita-learn.org/].  Over that time we started hosting lots of school districts and even Pittsburgh Public Schools [http://www.pps.k12.pa.us]; and as I grew more and more comfortable with Moodle I provided phone and email support to users with questions, school-based training sessions and self-paced tutorials to learn about and see Moodle in action.

GlobalClassroom was a great experience and I left in February 2010.  It still offers basic free hosting of Moodle (though you won’t find it in name on the site), registration is available at this link: http://www.globalclassroom.us/static/register

You’ll also find my original Moodle blog (focused on the GlobalClassroom flavor), http://theglobalclassroom.blogspot.com/.

URL: http://www.globalclassroom.us/
Description: network based Moodle community
Ads?: no
3rd party plug-ins: no
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: phone, email, tutorials and self-serve
Business plan: Freemium
Limits: no, students must self-register unless an eSchool is created (then they may be uploaded in bulk)
Basic Plan: teachers may created unlimited courses

Today we’re going to talk about one of the most progressive hosting initiatives, e-Socrates, “free Moodle hosting with ethics”.  Though a simple idea, e-Socrates is Italy’s premier hosting community where in exchange for support, hosting and a Moodle classroom of your own you need only share your content with the world.  e-Socrates’ goal is to create a totally open educational platform where learners from any where can peek in and benefit from your educational materials.

A nod to a forefather of the intellectual age, the site says,

…as you may know we strongly believe that knowledge is a whole humanity’s heritage (that’s why we created the e-Socrates.org community). When you create a course within e-Socrates you always allow website visitors the right to read your contents, you can prevent them from subscribing as students but you can’t prevent them from accessing the material. This is the only “fee” we ask teachers in change of the free hosting service.

URL: http://e-socrates.org
Description: Open Educational Community based in Moodle
Ads?: yes
3rd party plug-ins: no
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: community forums (English and Italian)
Business plan: the company behind the hosting service has shut it’s doors but an former member of the company has taken charge of e-Socrates.org and hosting continues unchanged though new course requests have been temporarily suspended.
Limits: no
Basic Plan: 1 course

This part of the Special Summer Series on hosting highlights a different kind of Moodle hoster in MoodleReader.  We highlighted MoodleReader recently because of its complete utility for teachers managing developmental writing courses.  Literally this module comes with 100s of preset quizzes based on popular young-adult and children’s books that can easily be integrated into your course.  It’s all quite amazing and the list of books continues to grow and grow.

Through a brief exchange with Tom Robb, site admin at MoodleReader.org,

[Moodlereader.org does] sponsor free courses at moodlereader.org for any legitimate educational organization.  I’ve recently created a “registration block” that allows the course owners to upload their own student registrations since this is normally a site-admin function in Moodle.  Teachers can select subsets of the quizzes to match the books available locally and tailor the point scheme used — by words, pages or books and assign their own values for these to each quiz that they use.

We now have quizzes for some 900 books and about 50 schools worldwide using the module.

So if you’re teaching developmental or elementary reading and want to use Moodle (either your own or a free hosted solution) consider MoodleReader and the Moodle Graded Reader Module.

MoodleReader

URL: http://moodlereader.org
Description: Module-centric site for reading
Ads?: no
3rd party plug-ins: Moodle Graded Reader Module
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: local/email
Business plan: university and government supported
Limits: no
Basic Plan: 1 course

This one is new to me: LearningObjectivity [http://www.learningobjectivity.com/].  The service is available for any teachers that want to try out Moodle before their school (or they as individuals) take on a Moodle site of their own.  According to the site,

Organisations and individuals who are new to Moodle can use this area to run one or more courses at minimal or no cost until they are ready to set up their own Moodle site. We can also host your own Moodle test site.

LearningObjectivity also offers elearning consulting, training and professional development by Richard Goddard, someone well versed in Moodle uses and development to add additional functionality (Richard worked on both MrCute and EasyView).

URL: http://www.learningobjectivity.com/moodle19/
Description: testing ground for Moodle-curious teachers and organizations
Ads?: no
3rd party plug-ins: NA
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: self serve/email
Business plan: consulting
Limits: no
Basic Plan: 1 course

Next up, a k-12 exclusive hosting service, SqoolTools.  According to the site, “Sqool” is actually an acronym (not just a homophone) for “Supporting Quality Online Opportunities for Learning”.

The business offers additional edtech consulting services [http://sqooltechs.com/] and sites and several tiers of paid Moodle hosting above their free, basic plan.  Check out their Youtube channel [http://www.youtube.com/user/sqooltechs] or even their hosted video site, http://sqooltube.com/.  All in all they’ve created a resource-rich collection of educational tools and resources.

More information is available at http://www.sqooltools.com/

URL: http://www.sqooltools.com/
Description: 1 course at the basic level.  Supported by edtech consultants with a resource-rich tool kit.
Ads?: yes (but minimal)
3rd party plug-ins: yes (audio recording only, other 3rd party modules with paid contract)
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: self serve is free, $10 per ticket for help desk
Business plan: Freemium model
Limits: yes, must be k12
Basic Plan: 1 course, 30 students, 250MB

Up today is Gnomio, hosting that provides an up to date approach (but a load of advertisement space) to each Moodle installation.

According to the site here’s a bit about the people behind the service,

Gnomio is not a company. We are only a couple of spanish guys enjoying a unexpected success while spending our little time.  We are hosting over one thousand e-learning sites and we give service to tens of thousands of students at no cost.

The pros?  Gnomio is equipped with the MLE (Mobile-enabled) which you can utilize to provide some Mobile functionality from your Moodle site (more information is available at http://mle.sourceforge.com).

The cons?  in your face advertisements (example).

URL: http://www.gnomio.com
Description: sub-domain based registration like Ninehub, this hosting is funded through Ads and donations
Ads?: yes
3rd party plug-ins: yes (more than 10 Moodle plug-ins including many of the most popular)
Mobile-enabled: yes
Support: NA
Business plan: donations [faq]
Limits: no
Basic Plan: Full administrator rights to a sub-domain site, unrestricted and unlimited disk space; honor code (no large files)

We’ll cover it’s limits, basic plans, level of support and the 3rd party modules and add-ons included with the free service.  At a minimum we’ll only highlight those services that have a completely free (no obligation) Moodle offering that you can even use as a production environment.  Too good to be true?  Well, we hope not but we will highlight how these fine organizations cover the costs of the free service so that you can better understand how sustainability the service may be.

First up: Ninehub

URL: http://ninehub.com
Description: This web development company was one of the first free Moodle hosting companies that gave all users their own individual installation.
Ads?: yes
3rd party plug-ins: no
Mobile-enabled: no
Support: email only
Business plan: they are a web development company
Limits: NA
Basic Plan: Full administrator rights to a sub-domain site, unrestricted and unlimited disk space.