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 forum
• Analytics and Reporting forum

A Twitter account exists for sharing Moodle research. Following @MoodleResearch will allow you to be made aware of relevant educational technology research from a Moodle perspective.

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.

Research activities related Moodle

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 2013
  • Research is presented at MoodleMoots around the world.
• A Usability study was conducted on Moodle 2.9
• Moodle Accessibility Collaboration Group

See also

• Learning analytics
• Logging
• Learning Analytics API specification
• Events specification
• Logging specification
• Report Builder API specification