My 6th Form experimented with Moodle when I was a student there - that was a loooooong time ago (2004? 2006?). I remember the staff weren't happy that Moodle allowed students to set their own avatars because too many kids figured out you could use animated GIFs as avatars, probably copied from eBaums or deviantArt; while others uploaded shock-images or just controversial content because I guess that's just funny to a bunch of 16yos.

The school ditched the experiment after a few months because Moodle simply wasn't delivering any real value: the teachers didn't want to have to type-up their handwritten lesson-plans and manually scan-in their existing non-digitized content, and those that did already have digitized content (those smug 6th Form computer science teachers, naturally) didn't want to have to "refactor" (I guess that's the right word?) their content to fit into Moodle's way-of-doing-things.

I think as the experiment came to an end we were only using it for ungraded quiz-taking - we weren't even using it for submitting homework (teachers still preferred e-mail for that: the 6th Form already had its own on-prem MS Exchange set-up that everyone used - and we could e-mail staff from our personal e-mail accounts too, which was nice - I know a lot of schools kept closed, on-prem-only, not-internet-facing e-mail systems to avoid spam - this was back when spam filters were awful and spam itself regularly included actual porn and other very-inappropriate-for-schools content, so I can understand why those other schools did).

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I haven't laid-eyes Moodle ever since then - every few years someone will mention it but I've never had a chance to speak to anyone who actually uses it to find out if it's actually any better than it was 15 years ago - and how it's changed at all. Can you fill me in?

And still far better than Blackboard?