We are rapidly approaching the end of another year and as I reflect on how busy 2021 has been, I want to celebrate the many milestones that Moodle has achieved.
Firstly, and most importantly, I would like to thank everyone in the Moodle community for your involvement and support – educators, developers, learners, managers, administrators, partners and Moodle HQ team members. Last month we celebrated the 20th anniversary of Moodle’s first source code commit. Since then our community collaboration has involved thousands of developers from 57 countries and over 128,000 code commits, and our registered Moodle community now includes over 300,000,000 people worldwide.
I am incredibly proud that Moodle achieved the distinction of becoming an official Certified B Corporation (B Corp)™ in September. This certification is hugely important to us as it recognises Moodle as a purpose-first organisation, with a commitment to our mission, open source philosophy and implementing practices that consider not just shareholder value, but the impact on educators, learners, employees, customers, society, and the environment.
We remain, as ever, committed to Moodle LMS as an open source platform and early in the year we signed the Standards First Pledge, an indicator of trust and transparency about Moodle’s use of open standards. Over the year, we celebrated the release of Moodle LMS 3.11, including, amongst other improvements, a new Accessibility checker toolkit and activity completion feature. We are very excited about the release of Moodle 4.0 scheduled for the first quarter of 2022. Informed by an extensive discovery process, Moodle 4.0 will include a whole series of UX improvements that our community has been asking for including improved navigation, course page structure and dashboard.
We launched two important open source initiatives for the Moodle community in 2021. The first, Moodle Academy, is the home for learning everything about online education with Moodle. Moodle Academy launched with a series of webinars late this year and will expand in 2022 to provide educators, administrators, designers or developers with a community of best practice, interaction and professional development. As many of you will know, I am an advocate of open education infrastructure as central to the future of education and we have recently launched MoodleNet 2.0, the beginnings of a new social network to collect, curate and share open educational resources. Integrated with Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace, educators will be able to easily find resources for their courses, as well as share open education content with other educators. We encourage you to join the network and become part of this important movement.
Extending the strong foundation of Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace continues to go from strength to strength as more organisations embrace a culture of learning as central to supporting skill development in their employees, retaining talent and maintaining a culture of inclusivity and diversity. Incorporating the improvements of Moodle LMS 3.11, the Moodle Workplace 3.11 release also included enhanced custom reporting features and new Learning Overview and My Teams tabs. In a mutually beneficial relationship, Moodle LMS contributes to the development of Moodle Workplace while the enhancements created for workplace learning contribute knowledge to our community and Moodle LMS as open source code and features. For instance, Custom Reports, a feature of Moodle Workplace, is being incorporated into Moodle 4.0 as a standard feature.
A key part of Moodle is our Certified Service Provider network which helps support our community, while providing sustainability to our product development teams. Our network continues to expand and we now have over 100 global partners helping customers get the most out of their Moodle solution. This year, our partner network has completed inspiring projects for customers such as the US Airforce, UK College of Policing, Dublin City University, Monash University, McGraw Hill, University of Jordan, Norwegian Ageing and Health, Network Rail and the Louisiana Research Centre for Educators to name but a few.
I am very pleased to welcome new partners Balance Internet (Australia), Buen Data (Colombia), Catalyst (Canada), CNW System Integrator Co. (Hungary), Eummena (Belgium), Industria Elearning (Peru), Sparkfore (Sweden) and Vextur (Latvia and Lithuania) to the Moodle Certified Service Provider program in 2021. I also congratulate new Premium partners, IThink UPC and Praxis. Only Moodle’s Certified Service Providers are endorsed by our exacting standards in customer service and technical capability.
A key highlight in 2021 was the launch of Moodle US which was formed by our acquisition of three of our US certified partners: My Learning Consultants, Moonami Learning Solutions and Elearning Experts. It has been amazing to be able to bring together so many experienced Moodle experts and technology to deliver the best possible Moodle services for educators and organisations in the US. Moodle US will also become the hub of developments in hosting and services technologies which will benefit the entire network of Moodle Certified Service Providers and their customers.
Personally, I’ve not travelled at all this year, but I was able to connect with many members of the Moodle international community at eight online MoodleMoots. I am always inspired by hearing about innovative Moodle use cases and I hope to have the opportunity to meet you again at an in-person event next year!
It has been a year of hard work and achievements across all Moodle products, services and initiatives and I want to thank you for your contribution or for simply being part of the Moodle family.
Peace and best wishes to you from all of us here at Moodle HQ.
Martin Dougiamas, Founder and CEO
