Assessing Moodle as Learning Management System Platform for English Course Based TOEFL

This paper reports a research in progress of an academic effort to adopt TOEFL materials into English course for vocational education particularly at State Polytechnic of Ujung Pandang. During the last five years, open source Learning Management Systems called Moodle has been used in the institution as a platform to deliver several science and engineering related courses in blended learning environment. This study investigates and assesses how the similar platform might also be used to enhance English teaching which contents have been enriched based on TOEFL system. Basic features of Moodle were assessed according to three main TOEFL skills namely TOEFL Listening Comprehension (LC), TOEFL Structure and Written Expression (SWE) and TOEFL Reading Comprehension (RC). Our findings suggest that while most Moodle’s features ready for delivering TOEFL based English course, except in handling Listening skills. Future works is recommended to apply additional Moodle plugins to tackle the issue addressed in this study. Keywords— Learning management system, Moodle, English course, TOEFL, vocational education.