Kimi,
Our institution uses both Moodle and D2L. My department supports all of Letters & Science, but particular supports Language instructors for historical reasons. We started running Moodle years ago because of some of the limitations in D2L for foreign language instructors.
1. We have found that currently D2L handles most non-latin characters, but is not good at formatting right-to-left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew (formatting such as bullet lists and right or left alignment of text.) If you are at all looking at localization of D2L courses (where all your menus and navigation are in the target language), be aware that their "language packs" are very pricey, and they have a limited number (Canadian French, Arabic, and Chinese plus a few others).
2. There is, in the latest version of D2L, an audio recorder which can be used by both the instructor and students. The default time limit on the recording, however, is quite small (under a minute, as I recall), but your campus can up that if they wish (we asked ours to go to a five-minute limit). Video can be embedded wherever there is an editor (using the "insert stuff" button), but your campus will have to decide how much space to allot for this as videos tend to be quite large.
3. SCORM packages can be imported into D2L courses. I've never done it myself, but the process is described in this article:
http://community.desire2learn.com/newsletter2007Q1/community4.html4. There is no voice chat. I don't know of any other feature particularly geared towards language learning.
5. While D2L is gaining features with each new release, our language instructors, particularly from the East Asian Dept., still prefer Moodle for their courses. This could be because they are familiar with it, or because they want to take advantage of features the Moodle has that are still not quite mature (or missing!) in D2L, such as true wikis and blogs, anything akin to the peer review Workshop or the interactivity of Lesson, the integration of Hot Potatoes exercises and Nanogong-based activities, etc.
Overall, Moodle still provides more opportunities for interactive online experiences for students than D2L does, and I think that's what our foreign language faculty like about it. Plus, being open-source, Moodle has customizable capabilities that D2L does not.
Karen Tusack
Senior Instructional Technology Consultant
L&S Learning Support Services
UW-Madison, 1220 Linden Dr. Madison, WI 53706
608-262-4471
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---Jorge Luis Borges