MoodleMoot UK & Ireland 2018 in Glasgow was the place to be, if you asked yourself like I did: “What will be the future of the Learning Management System (LMS) called Moodle?”. In fact, from the 26th to the 28th of March 2018, the Moodle Headquarters organized a conference dedicated to Moodle Partners (companies offering Moodle services such as Liip), as well as developers and administrators of the very popular open source course management system. That was a great opportunity to meet all these stakeholders and learn about the actual trends of this LMS. The program begins with the announcement of a $6 million investment from the company Education for the Many. Moodle HQ will make use of this funding to improve consistency and sustainability, to build a new European Headquarter in Barcelona and to improve its didactic approach.

A new investor believing in the Moodle mission

Martin Dougiamas, founder and CEO of the Moodle HQ, opens the conference with an inspiring keynote about the goals for the near future. Reminding the mission – empowering educators to improve our world – he articulates the vision of the company.

“Education is maybe the only weapon that can make a difference, as we need responsible persons to face the current issues of our world”.

This turning point requires financial support. Education for the Many, an investment company of the French-based Leclercq family involved in well-known businesses such as Decathlon sporting goods, understands the challenges that Moodle is facing. They are not focused only on the return on investment but they also care about the educational vision. For the time and money invested, Education for the Many receives a minor stake in Moodle HQ and a seat on the board.

Future challenges

“It’s time to make Moodle amazing!”, continued Martin. One of the benefits for Europeans will be the growth of the Moodle office in Barcelona. It should expand to become like the headquarters in Perth. Therefore, Barcelona will turn into the European Moodle HQ. As most Moodle users are located in Europe, being close to them is an advantage. The Moodle product is and should always remain competitive. Ensuring this is one of the pillars of the new strategy. With this goal in mind, the future Moodle 3.6+ versions will be designed to achieve sustainability at a high level. Furthermore, they will concentrate on improving the usability, creating standards, enhancing system integrations as well as being supported across all devices.

Engaging the learners

One of the big challenges as a teacher is to keep participants engaged during the learning process. To support this, Moodle HQ is developing a special certification for Moodle Partners, so they can deepen their software knowledge and get up-to-date on the best practices for online content creation. Through official Moodle Partners, teachers can access the same education platforms. This is how the Learn Moodle platform aims to significantly improve the quality of teaching. Moreover, effort will be invested to maximize connections inside the community of users and administrators, in order to build a big and strong userbase through the moodle.net association. This platform will support the creation of educative content as well as sharing and offering services. Every Moodler is welcome to take part in this project.

To summarize, I came back from the conference more confident than ever about Moodle's potential, empowered as a Moodle Partner, and impatient to bring Moodle's capabilities to our customers.

The main topics of this years UK & Ireland Moodle conference in Dublin were Learning Analytics and the Moodle Association . Further notable topics were (the more technical) inclusion of  Bootstrap 3 in Moodle, the w orking groups for the simplification of forms  and for designing a student dashboard .

As Moodle HQ are in the process of taking ownership of a couple of key Moodle conferences (Dublin was not one of them, but there was strong collaboration), the new format of “working groups” was tested on a larger scale. The idea of a working group is for Moodle users to work on a a specific topic in order to come up with specifications for Moodle HQ to implement as improvements to the Moodle core. The topics here were “form simplification” and “student dashboard”. These working groups have a certain weight, as a delegate from HQ will take part, with the task to make sure the outcomes can (and will) actually be implemented. An interesting observation here was, that at the hackday at the end of the conference, as the working group findings were presented and discussed, the tasks were heavily challenged by developers who naturally prioritise and approach things differently. I could sense a bit of frustration there when a response from HQ representatives would be “this is what the working group was for and basically you're too late now with your input”. I think it is early days for the working group approach and it will take some time to get used to it.

The most heated discussions were on the initiation of the Moodle Association, as presented by Martin Dougiamas. Martin has been looking for new ways to fund Moodle development for some time now and this is what he decided to do. The Moodle Association is a non profit organisation (and therefore excempt from taxation). It will be completely separate from Moodle HQ after the initial work necessary to launch it. The idea is, for members of the association to come up with specifications and funding for Moodle core development and then to contract HQ to do the work. Martin would like to see instituions to be members in order to comission large junks of development work. There will be a correlation between how much money an entity puts into the association and how many votes it will have. All projects will be up for the association members to vote on. The projects with the highest votes will have the association's funds allocated to it and will be developed by Moodle HQ. There will be some sort of cap on how many votes individual association members can have.

The idea of this associations opens a lot of questions of course, especially on what it means for Moodle partners who are currently the sole source of funding for Moodle (10% of revenue from Moodle related work by partners goes to Moodle HQ).

The keynote on learning analytics by Bart Rientes from the Open University gave a very interesting insight into what Open University do with their attempt at predictive analytics . The idea there is to show learners which areas of the curriculum they should focus on for the best outcome, based on data analysis. This topic raised two main questions: How do students get to see and use this data and what are the questions we want the (analytics-) system to answer. In a hands-on example with Gavin Henrick I experienced how difficult it is to come up with this question. Without this question being sensibly formulated though, learning-analytics somewhat remains a buzz-word.

The best example of a customised Moodle was presented by Thomas Bell with the United for Wildlife MOOC platform they launched as beta on that day (…). The platform comes with a rather beautiful user interface. Check it out! learn.unitedforwildlife.org

David Mudrak gave a good overview of how the plugins universe works , with a plea for more support on reviewing third party plugins. This reminded me of our initiative to collaborate and publish security reviews of plugins we do for our clients. Somehow it seems hard to motivate developers or companies to collaborate on this.

Davo Smith eloquently convinced us how easy it is to use Behat testing and Dan Poltawski demonstrated how Moodle HQ do continuous integration.

The hackday brought some excellent discussion and follow-up work on the integration of Bootstrap 3 and the state of renderers and templates in Moodle. This was once again the most inspiring part of the Moot, there's some very talented people that are passionately involved in making Moodle the best VLE out there. This is no easy task, considering the massive amount of code and all those legacy bits still lingering. One of the reasons Moodle needs more funding is to make it the best possible option on the VLE market. The competition is there and work needs to be done. The difficulty here is the generic nature of Moodle: changes need to work for all the users, not just one specific site.

Thanks to Gavin Henrick and the team for making this great MoodleMoot possible. And thanks to Liip for giving this little bit extra to allow me to travel to Ireland by train, bus and boat.

Penny's Experience

This was my 7th or 8th Moodlemoot, so for me the most important part was seeing other Moodlers again and catching up with what they're doing. I didn't go to many of the talks, since it stretches my German somewhat, but I very much enjoyed Ralf Hilgenstock's keynote address, including some interesting photos of Moodlers and a preview of Moodle 2.0.

Officially, during the conference, I co-led a talk and workshop with about Mahara which went very well – at the end of our workshop we had attendees doing a demonstration of the presentations they created about what they had learned during the course of the Moodlemoot, which was great to see, from people who had never used Mahara before.

 I also did a handover of MNet to David Mudrak. I was working on MNet during my secondment to Moodle HQ in January and February, but I can't really maintain it as actively as I need when back in my normal life, and David volunteered while we were at the Moodle developer conference last December in the Czech Republic.

Finally, of course we upheld the fine Moodlemoot tradition of Mojito drinking. This has been a tradition as long as I remember, and apparently I am partially to blame for inroducing Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder, to Mojitos many years ago.

Thanks very much Liip for giving me the time to go to this conference, and of course the organisers for a stellar job.

Adi's Experience

The MoodleMoot in Berlin was my first MoodleMoot so it was quite a different experience for me.

I really liked Ralf Hilgenstock's (eledia.de) Keynote on Moodle 2.0. It provided a nice overview over the upcoming features of Moodle 2.0.

The interesting thing about MoodleMoots is that most of the participants are teachers/people from educational institutions.

Although you will meet the occasional core developer it's mostly an end user conference. This means you meet a lot of people that are confronted with Moodle in their day-to-day life. What struck me most was the amount of enthusiasm these people are showing for Moodle. I had a lot of conversations with other attendees and I was suprised to see how much effort they put into advocating Moodle. Apparently in Germany it's quite hard to introduce new tools into the class rooms due to a lot of bureaucracy. Still those people fight for Moodle until it gets accepted by superiors and pupils.

A lot of the talks at the MoodleMoot were from teachers sharing their experiences in adapting Moodle to their specific needs. Even though most of them do not really have any programming experience they manage to adapt Moodle to their needs.

It was also interesting to meet some of the core developers (David Mudrak and Petr Škoda) and being introduced to the MoodleMoot Mojito tradition.

From a developer point of view I can highly recommend taking part in a MoodleMoot because you get to see how people use Moodle in real life to get the most out of it.