As Moodle celebrates its 15th birthday, I’m thrilled to see the community which I originally found to be so inviting, vibrant, and exciting to be a part of, has only continued to grow and evolve into one of the largest education focused communities in the world.
Over the last decade, I’ve witnessed a lot of change in Moodle and its community. Aside from massive growth worldwide, Moodle is a first mover in the mobile space (especially its innovative approach to offline access), it has made major headway for accessibility (an important and oft overlooked feature of learning tools worldwide), it has benefitted from 3rd party developers creating and maintaining a vast, extensible toolset through its plugins database, and it has adopted innovative approaches to funding itself with an eye to long term sustainability through its partner program, users association, and now, institutional investment.
I have my own ideas about how Moodle will continue to evolve. But I thought it would be very interesting to learn how other Moodle experts see the world’s most popular LMS change and grow.
So, I reached out to:
- Developers
- Moodle Partners
- University level administrators
- Plugin maintainers
- Moodle focused non-partner businesses
- Moodle community members, and
- Moodle User Association members
And I asked them about their history with Moodle over the past 15 years:
- What is the single most important thing the Moodle community has accomplished in the last 15 years?
- What features are most important to Moodle today, in your opinion?
- What’s your fondest Moodle community memory? (e.g. story from a Moot, from the forums, meetup, collaboration, etc.)
And, then I asked them what they think the next 15 years holds:
- What do you think the Moodle community will look like in 15 years?
- What challenges have remained insufficiently dealt with or unaddressed by Moodle and other LMS?
- What are future needs/requirements that the community and developers should know about? Or reworded: what are upcoming challenges yet to materialize in full force?
I’ve complied all of their answers in an easy-to-read PDF. If you’d like to know how the experts believe Moodle will evolve over the next 15 years, follow the link below!
Thank you!
– Joe Thibault, founder of MoodleNews
