It's used extensively in Australia too, and having recently gone through an university that uses it extensively for assignment submissions, out of class "discussions", and a few other things, and it's a terrible, broken platform.
The primary thing I was forced to use it for was assignment submission, which was primarily collections of source-code, compiled binaries and reports on them,so nothing overly large, though generally larger than the single word document I suspect the uploader was designed for, and it was horrible.
If your connection was somewhat poor the uploads sometimes randomly failed either reporting success or not reporting anything at all, sometimes it took hours to upload small files, and frequently you had to use chrome to upload, as the firefox uploader would simply fail. Even uploading from the university campus, from the same building the servers were hosted in the upload process was frequently so risky that some lecturers asked for the submission of source code in physical copies, as well as the digital submission, to ensure something got submitted they could look at.
I'd love for something better built to take over, but given how dominant moodle is in the market, I can't see it being shifted any time soon.
It is possible that the server admin fucked your particular installation. Moodle is well tested and such a major functionality being broken is not possible. Moodle does eat up substantial amount of resources (CPU/RAM) but usually the sysad has to be smart enough to gauge resources according to expected concurrent users.
Really? I have used Moodle extensively both in my own courses (at a high school level) and in my own studies at university. I have had very little negative feedback from students, nor have I observed much difficulty in using it.
As a student I had to use Moodle in several courses. I, and I think most of my year, hated it with passion. Yet we had no place to send feedback to. A bunch of undergrads bitching about crappy UX - no one will listen to them. Maybe let's make the next a bit harder, so that those undergrads shut up and know their place. Damn, no one listen to our feedback about more serious issues. High-schoolers are even less likely to speak up. They deal with what they get, without a feeling things could be different.
So maybe you had very little negative feedback because there were no channels available for your students to express such feedback?
Moodle is a broken, confusing and aesthetically unpleasant piece of software, with only one upside - it's self-hosted.
My students speak up about every other thing that bothers them (trust me on this :P), so I don't see why their use of courseware would be any different.
I looked into a bunch of different LMS packages when we were looking for something to run at our school and Moodle was the best of the bunch that wasn't externally hosted (legal requirement for anything with student data). Our education department has since rolled their own LMS which is almost useless in comparison, so all in all I'm pretty happy with Moodle.
I know it isn't all sunshine and rainbows and there are plenty of things it could do better but it's better than the other LMS stuff I've used as a student and better than the other stuff I've found as a teacher.
Moodle may be ok or it may suck. The problem is many of us in the UK stopped getting updates. Any software without updates is going the completely suck.
In a nutshell. Our county said you're all getting a moodle with your broadband package. After a bit they got rid of everyone who maintained that install and access to the servers.
Now it's just maintained by the small IT staff (if any) at various schools. These people may have the skills to learn how to deploy their own moodle but they sure as hell don't have the time.
Students, teachers and administrators everyone hates it. Though I would say this is partly because teachers and administrators arent trained properly.
I agree it does have a UI which dates back a decade and consequently not a very good UX, However moodle HQ is well aware of this problem and I expect them to crank out better UI/UX in newer versions. The lack of training aspect, I am not sure how much are they serious in tackling.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
However students hate it, mainly because its not very good.