Your cart is currently empty!
Moodle in Corporate eLearning Mirrors Higher Education Trends
In late February 2017, Moodle marked a historic milestone bysurpassing over 100 million registered users worldwide who are utilizing thefree open-source system through approximately 100,000 individual installationsin both K-20 and professional education instances in governments, corporations,and nonprofits. This makes it the most widely used system in the world. Throughmy role as CEO of eThink Education, a Certified US MoodlePartner, I’ve personally witnessed the massive effect Moodle has had on the learningmanagement system (LMS) market. Open-source Moodle provided much neededdisruption to the LMS market at a time when people were eager for more choicesand yet, surprisingly, even after 15 years in existence, much confusion remainsabout its benefits and the foundations of the ecosystem that supports it. Inthis article, I will attempt to provide some clarification about the ecosystemand about the growth of Moodle’s adoption across markets.
Moodle and the higher education market
Moodle, developed by Martin Dougiamas and headquartered inPerth, Australia, was first released in 2002 and has since grown both in itsrobust, cutting-edge feature set and in its ever-adapting ecosystem ofcommercial partners designed to support its growth and ensure that Moodleremains free for many years to come. To understand the significant disruptionwe are now seeing by Moodle in the corporate market, it is necessary to lookback at the effect Moodle had in the higher education market when it was firstreleased.
At the time of its release there were only two main LMSscompeting well in the higher education market—Blackboard and WebCT. Accordingto LISTedTECH, in 2002, each company controlled40 to 50 percent of the market. When Moodle first came out in 2002, I was aconsultant working for Ellucian (formerly Sungard Higher Education/SCT), an ERPprovider to colleges and universities. I spent 45 or more weeks on the roadeach year and was given the opportunity to meet in person with over 100different colleges throughout my time there. As I traveled to set up ERPsolutions I heard the same story regarding each college’s LMS: the cost ofthese two main LMS systems were extremely high and there were complaints on alack of innovation in product functionality as well as support quality. Themarket was ripe for new competition.
By 2005, new products such as Angel, eCollege, andDesire2Learn started to gain market share by offering more product innovationas well as better pricing and support. Moodle, which had been developed as areaction to the exact same concerns I’d heard from colleges and universitiesthroughout the US and Canada during my travels with Ellucian, represented about eight percent of new higher education implementations this year. Itwas also in 2005 that Blackboard acquired WebCT, retaining its position as themarket share leader. This was a move that at the time gave Blackboard contractswith more than 80 percent of the market.
Colleges and universities reacted to this news by moving inmuch higher numbers to Moodle. By 2006, one year after the merger, Moodlerepresented 26 percent of the new implementations for US higher education institutions.Both eCollege and Angel continued to do well over the next several years;however, both would be purchased—eCollege by Pearson in 2007 and Angel byBlackboard in 2009. Both systems were eventually sunset by their respectiveacquirers which left those colleges with no option but migration to anothersystem. All of this led to frustration by colleges that continued to migrate toMoodle and in 2009—just seven years after its release—Moodle represented 41percent of new implementations that year.
Moodle in the corporate market
Unlike higher education institutions, for which LMSs havebecome almost essential, many corporations are just beginning to understand theimportance of utilizing eLearning in the workplace. In 2014, the learning management market was well over $2.5 billion and grew by over 21 percentthat year. As the corporate market continues to grow, the trends we are seeingare almost identical to what we saw 10 years ago in higher education. In thefirst several months of 2017, we have already seen two very large closed-sourcecorporate learning and talent management system acquisitions announced. NetDimensions was acquired by Learning Technologies Group and Halogen Software was acquired by Saba Solutions. What this means for the clients ofthese companies remains to be seen. However, we can say that we have seen morecorporate institutions migrating from closed-source products to Moodle for thesame three reasons as when we experienced the massive uptick in the highereducation market: a desire for lower cost, better service, and a more robustfeature set.
First, let’s address lower cost. Moodle is free. There isabsolutely no licensing cost. For many, this is hard to believe and is the mainsource of skepticism about its quality and general confusion on how this couldbe. So, let’s start by breaking down the ecosystem that supports the abilityfor Moodle to remain free and allow it to continue innovations in its design. Moodleheadquarters is the central hub of the ecosystem and functions as a nonprofit. Itis a dedicated group of developers who are still led by Dougiamas. Moodle HQsets the roadmap of the product, which is not only open to the community tosee, but is largely influenced by feedback from the robust and active communityof end-users across the globe. The developers at Moodle HQ put releases outtwice a year, as well as bug fixes as needed, and publish them to their website.
As an institution, you are welcome to download Moodle and useit freely on your own servers, but many choose to utilize a Moodle Partnerinstead because Partners can usually manage Moodle more efficiently and costeffectively. The Partners act as the lifeblood of the financial support to HQand contribute 10 percent of their revenue back to HQ. The partner network hasgrown extensively over the past several years and now boasts 87 CertifiedMoodle Partners in 43 countries. As this network has grown, so has the qualityof services offered as well as the amount of revenue that HQ can use to furtherexpand the product.
Secondly, let’s address why Moodle has superior service qualitycompared to other closed-source products in the market. The advantage forclients using Moodle can be summed up in one word: competition. There are many partners offering competing servicesfor the same open-source Moodle product. This forces Moodle partners to providethe best service possible at the lowest price, or clients will simply taketheir Moodle database and migrate to another company or even self-host theirMoodle environment. Clients also own their data and the Moodle code base isfree, giving them complete freedom and ease to leave if our service was ever todeteriorate.
In contrast, service for closed-source solutions can only beprovided by the company issuing the code. There is no competition in quality ofservice and, therefore, it makes it impossible to leave unless the institutionwants to completely replace their system with a different product. This is instark contrast to the service-oriented Moodle companies that do not sell alicense to their product. Service is the only thing you pay for from Moodlepartners, which is why companies that switch to Moodle are typically reducingtheir costs while at the same time improving their quality of service.
Lastly, let’s address why the functionality of Moodle has beenmore robust and grown more rapidly than most closed-source solutions. This isdue to the ability of the Moodle community to drive development. Not only doesa community of several hundred thousand administrators actively participate onpublicly accessible forums that help dictate future direction ofthe product but, furthermore, those administrators can see every line of codein the product and make edits that are submitted for review by HQ that aid thework of Moodle HQ’s core development team. Another advantage of Moodle is themodular nature of the product, which allows anyone to build a module that canbe published for the Moodle community to download and use for free. There arecurrently more than 1,300 modules listed in the plugin directorythat can be installed at no cost to extend an installation of Moodle.
Over the last year, we have seen a massive uptick in thenumber of organizations of every size moving to Moodle. Companies continue tomake the switch to open-source Moodle, reducing costs and improving theirlearning outcomes while also finding comfort in the fact that they own the codefor their learning platform and, thus, can demand a high level of service.
