Sandbox: Moodle

Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles , to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a 50,000-student University. This site itself is created using Moodle, so check out the Moodle Features Demo.

Worldwide, there are more than 6000 institutions using Moodle, among them the Open University of the UK, Ohio State University , the University of York, Canada's Open University , New Zealand Polytechnic, l'Université Numérique Région Bretagne , the University of Iceland, and a number of other european Universities in Spain , Germany (including Humboldt University in Berlin) , Japan, the Middle East, South and Central America, etc. Moodle adoption is growing dramatically, live statistics on the numbers of sites, users, courses, etc. is available here: How many people are using Moodle?

Using Your Moodle from ACITT journal, Teaching ICT, Winter 2004. It provides a nice introduction with pictures to the moodle interface.

Blackboard vs. Moodle - A Comparison of Satisfaction with Online Teaching and Learning Tools  

A Comparison of Two Learning management Systems: Moodle vs Blackboard