Serendipity35

Academy is Moodle's version of a MOOC) platform, It's not that some people and institutions haven't gone done the MOOC road using the Moodle platform that was originally developed in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas to help educators create online courses. The Moodle platform was conceived with a focus on interaction and the collaborative construction of content and it has evolved over the past 15 years quite successfully. But it was not designed with the aim of hosting a course that contained tens of thousands of learners with different (and perhaps more limited) interactions and less emphasis on student-centered content creation.
There was an announcement about Academy in May 2016 and the Academy platform is still a preliminary version. As far as I have read, it is being used by only one institutional partner (Dublin City University) and for seven courses that are currently in the pre-enrollment stage).
At first mention, Moodle Academy was being compared to the Canvas Network because it seemed that Academy would be a centralized MOOC hosting platform run and managed by Moodle. This would be ideal for institutions (or individuals?) who wanted to offer a MOOC but needed not only a platform but the servers and bandwidth to deal with massive users and activity. I taught a meta-MOOC called "Academia and the MOOC" in the spring of 2013 in Canvas Network, and have used Canvas to teach undergraduate courses at a university since then.
I signed up for an Academy account and pre-enrolled for a course to test out the platform. (No start date listed yet.) The course is "21C Learning Design" and described as being for teachers who want to develop 21st Century skills in learning design. There is currently no content, but the platform itself looks very much like a Moodle course. For example, filling in my profile information, photo etc. was the same, and the home page with topics also looks the same as what I have used when I teach in Moodle at NJIT. 
AS with Canvas and Canvas Network, I suspect that Moodle and Academy will differ more behind the scene and screen and feel very comfortably similar for Moodle users.
If you want to try out Academy, go to https://academy.moodle.net/ and register. If you decide to take the 21C class, please message me there. It would be interesting to meet some Serendipity35 readers in a MOOC platform.