Abstract. One of the primary benefits of open source software is that it reduces the costs to produce
systems and services. Traditional proprietary software vendors are realizing this fact, and are beginning to
build their closed software products quietly using lots of open source software. In the long-run, competition
will force these cost savings to be passed to the consumer. In this paper the most important free and
commercial e-Learning systems and their functional features, modules, standards, hardware and software
requirements by Vendor’s Web sites and different e-Learning service portals are shortly summarized and
compared. We selected the Moodle system within an European projects, which is a software package for
producing Internet-based courses and web sites. It is an ongoing development project designed to support a
social constructionist framework of education. The aim of our European project was to promote the use of
multimedia knowledge in adult training / lifelong learning in order to facilitate competitiveness,
employability and mobility of adults who are victims of the digital divide or of some of its components such
as distance, initial level of knowledge, language, use of complex technologies. One of the results of the
NODES project is that we introduced the Moodle system into the graduate, postgraduate PhD, adult
trainings programmes and it is a very successful system as an educational portal system for our faculty. We
are using some extended tools in Moodle such as the Word templates for easy making Moodle
questionnaires, Covcell Audio/Video Conferencing Tool, Inwicast Mediacenter, Audio recorder, AutoView
Presenter which allows you to put video on-line with synchronised slides