Serendipity35

Moodle, the open source course management system, passed the eight year mark in August. (The actual launch date was also the the birthday of Moodle’s lead developer and founder.) Moodle usage now includes 52,000 registered Moodle sites and over 950,000 registered users on moodle.org (see Moodle statistics) with many more users at those sites.

            Moodle.org in August 2004 via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

One interesting aspect of its growth is the addition of language packs that allow Moodle to be used in many languages. There are 86 language packs for Moodle version 1.x. The latest language pack announcements might send you to Wikipedia. They recently announced a pack for Dzongkha, the official language of Bhutan, South Asia which is spoken by around 600 thousand people.

It's also important that these packs are also open source projects with the language packs being done by volunteer translators who continue to work on versions for Moodle 2.0 and future releases. If you look at the Moodle 2.0 language packs download page you can see some of the progress for each language.

Two of the new languages are Tigrinia and Amharic. Amharic and Tigrinya are languages spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, and have around 25 million and 6.7 million speakers respectively.

I started working with Moodle in 2005 when I was at NJIT. We were WebCT users but wanted to see what Moodle and Sakai offered. I focused on Moodle and we piloted a few courses but faculty were hesitant to make the big shift.

A presentation that I posted on Slideshare in 2007 has gotten 26,053 views and has been embedded on 55 other sites (including at The College St-Michel in France!), so there is certainly interest in open source learning management systems. It was a presentation I did at the NJEDge.Net Faculty Best Practices Showcase in March 2007 about NJIT’s pilot program and examining the open source/free aspect of Moodle and the support needed to implement it on a campus. 

I left NJIT in 2008 but the exploration continued and the university moved fully to Moodle last year. I still adjunct a few grad courses at NJIT, so I'm still using Moodle. And my current college is making a determination this year about what LMS to use in the future and Moodle is definitely in the mix.