We share Martin Dougiamas, Moodle Founder and CEO’ December 2020 Message:
2020 will be remembered as a year in which the Moodle Community mobilized to assist educators, institutions and governments transition to, or upscale, their online learning platforms. As the COVID-19 pandemic spread globally and millions of schools, training providers, higher education institutions and organizations shut down their classrooms and premises, Moodle’s 18 years of collective endeavour and expertise was put to good use. In fact, 2020 magnified the role of online learning in driving a more equitable and accessible approach to education and many institutions who found themselves unprepared selected Moodle’s open source, non-proprietary software as their tool of choice. In 2020, Moodle registered sites (the tip of the Moodle iceberg) doubled in size to over 200,000 and our global community of users expanded to more than 200 million.
In March, we became part of The Global Education Coalition, an open partnership facilitated by UNESCO formed in response to COVID-19, to ensure the continuity of education for all learners. What binds the coalition is a commitment to help countries assure the inclusive and equitable provision of distance education. Correspondingly, our 2020 projects were multifaceted and included working with governments across the world.
Throughout 2020 Moodle Partners experienced unprecedented growth amidst the demands a global pandemic placed upon their services. We thank our partners for their commitment to Moodle and more broadly for facilitating the development of high quality learning environments. MoodleCloud, our hosting solution for organizations who want to utilize our Moodle LMS without code-level customizations and integrations, experienced a 900% increase in customer sign ups over 2020. With the help of our generous community, we were able to provide free site hosting on MoodleCloud to NGOs and NFPs through the Moodle Community Donation Program. Ongoing donations will allow us to support further needy organizations with platform and hosting solutions.
Our investment into research and development increased, and we proudly released version 3.10 of Moodle LMS which enables educators to create and upload H5P content, store it, personalize it, use it across multiple courses, and have grades displayed in the gradebook. In addition, Moodle 3.10 allows course content to be downloaded and browsed offline and enables paid enrollments. Moodle Quiz, one of the most popular and loved activities on Moodle was further improved with new UX features. Moodle LMS has been optimized for workplace learning via Moodle Workplace, the flexible and customizable platform transforming human capital management. Only available through Moodle Partners, our latest release Moodle Workplace 3.10, has taken multi-tenancy one step further with new shared spaces, shared programs and shared certifications. Moodle Workplace grew exponentially over 2020 and Moodle Partners have secured some ground breaking projects with UK National Rail and the US Air Force to name but a few.
Next year, you’ll be seeing some of the biggest changes to Moodle for many years. Moodle 4.0 is planned for release in November 2021 and will provide major strides forward in user experience. Expect to see some slick new intuitive Moodle interfaces to help both educators and learners get things done more efficiently than ever.
From all of us at Moodle HQ – thank you for staying committed and being a part of the Moodle journey. We have many more announcements planned for 2021, so stay tuned for new and innovative initiatives in forthcoming months.
I wish you a peaceful and happy holiday season.
Martin Dougiamas, Founder and CEO
Please reach out if you have any questions.