Moodle research
This page describes why Moodle is used for educational research and what research activities take place in the Moodle community.
Why Moodle is involved in Research
There are a number of reasons Moodle is chosen as a platform for educational research.
- Common framework
Because Moodle is freely available and more featured than other Learning Management Systems, it is often chosen as a framework for collaborative research across institutions/organisations. Research conducted on one instance of Moodle, with or without customisations, can be replicated on another instance. - Aligned with academic ethos
The open source nature of Moodle, as a software product, is similar to the community of sharing present in academic research. - Extensible for research
Because Moodle can be customised, it can be used for experiments and data gathering, which would not be as easily conducted in other systems. A plugin created for research on one instance can be shared and used on another system easily.
Discussing Moodle research
There is a permanent discussion about research on moodle.org. The forum is home to discussions about research news including the sharing of significant Moodle-related research publications. A specific forum also exists for discussing Learning analytics.
Moodle research publications
The Moodle Research Library exists as a repository for published research related to Moodle. The repository contains research outputs relevant to the Moodle project and the works of Moodle's community of users.
- Journal articles
- Conference proceedings papers
- Papers written to complement MoodleMoot presentations
- Theses
- Other works of research
See more information about the Moodle Research Library.
Moodle community members come together to share research activities in a person in a number of ways.
- Working Groups
- Moodle Conferences
- Moodle Research Conferences were held in 2012 and http://research.moodle.net/cgi/search/simple?q=mrc2013 2013]
- Research is presented at MoodleMoots around the world.
- A Usability study was conducted on Moodle 2.9
- Moodle Accessibility Collaboration Group