Welcome to our series, Made with Moodle. Every month, we spotlight someone using the Moodle platform in creative, impactful ways. Have a story of your own? We’d love to hear it.
“You can do as much with Moodle LMS as you want. Now I’m obsessed!”
“Moodle is one of the best parts of my role,” says Dillon Richardson. “I say that with confidence — the community is amazing.”
Now the Director of Membership Services and Sport Development at the World Flying Disc Federation (WFDF), Dillon originally wanted to be a teacher. These days, he’s an online learning leader and an avid Moodler.
Growing up in Ottawa, Canada, he discovered flying disc in school and kept playing as an adult. His career took him into high-performance sport, then disability sport, where he spent much of his time delivering education and certification programmes.
“We were flying people all over the world to facilitate courses in-person,” he says, “but we had trouble getting content to our participants before these sessions. We created certificates manually — and collecting feedback felt like a struggle.”
Then the pandemic struck, and Dillon’s programmes had to go online. The learning platform they were using worked in the short term, but quickly began to feel limited and inflexible. It just couldn’t deliver content at scale to a growing number of global learners.
Frustrated by the challenges his team were facing, Dillon began looking at solutions used by other sports federations and organisations. He realised many of them had built tailored ecosystems with Moodle LMS, and decided his organisation would do the same.
That decision transformed how his team delivered learning, reaching participants in countries they’d never visited while automating many time-consuming administrative tasks.
When Dillon later joined the World Flying Disc Federation, the path forward seemed obvious.
“They did not have a system. They had a limited education programme. I was like, ‘Okay. This is easy. Moodle. Self-hosting.’”
Today, that vision has become WFDF Academy — a global learning platform supporting athletes, coaches, officials, teachers, administrators and volunteers across more than 125 member federations. From safeguarding and coaching to rules accreditation, school programmes and certification pathways, it provides stakeholders and their federations with access to education and certification courses.
For Dillon, offline learning is one of Moodle LMS’s biggest perks.
“We’ve added federations in developing countries where access to education and reliable internet can be difficult,” he says. “Now, we can provide users in all corners of the world with learning opportunities and they can download the courses, access them when they do have a connection, complete them when they don’t — I think that’s the coolest feature.”
Although he had no formal background in learning technology, Dillon immersed himself in the Moodle community, learning through Moodle Academy, exploring forums, and studying how universities and other organisations structure their courses.
“I’m not from this industry at all, but I realised you can do as much with Moodle LMS as you want. Now I’m obsessed,” he laughs.
These days, he still finds himself browsing Moodle success stories and blog posts, learning wherever he can.
“Whenever I see new case studies, I go digging,” he says. “I try to find their Moodle site and see what they’re doing.”
That willingness to learn from others has become central to his own work, and it’s one of the reasons he’s happy to share his story.
“Making high-quality, organised learning can be possible when you have a limited budget,” he says. “I love the fact that Moodle LMS is so open. It’s built on collaboration, which is really beautiful.”
