Roadmap

Last Updated: 13 March 2020 Q1

Introduction

The Moodle Project is designed to have a positive effect on the world by supporting and empowering the educators who are teaching students in all sectors, in all countries.

To do this, our team at Moodle HQ looks to the world, talks with our community, and creates solutions in the forms of products that fit our values of education, openness, respect, integrity and innovation.

This document summarises, for a broad audience, the best current plans on the future technical development of the Moodle’s open source learning platform, consisting of Moodle LMS, Moodle Workplace LMS, MoodleCloud, MoodleNet, Moodle Apps, and Moodle Educator Certificates.

We publish Roadmap updates such as this one every quarter.

Where this roadmap comes from

Proposals for improvements and new features come from a variety of different places.

Feedback from the community is extremely important and you can reach us by

• creating new issues on tracker,
• joining the Moodle Users Association to vote on a new project for each release,
• discussing your ideas on the forums,
• creating new solutions as a plugin in the Moodle Plugins directory,
• or meeting us in person at one of our MoodleMoots!

Moodle also has an extensive network of Moodle Partners. Moodle Partners are service providers that are certified by Moodle HQ to provide high quality Moodle services for schools, institutions and organisations. We work closely with our partners to determine the needs of Moodle Users and improve the platform.

Our Roadmap is built via our Roadmap process. This process is continuously evolving but it always seeks to involve all our key stakeholders - students, teachers, admins, institutions, and of course our partners and supporters.

The big picture

Working on the Moodle learning platform involves millions of moving parts, and every release generally includes hundreds of improvements. However, there are four main goals that we are focussing on for the next two years:

User experience and flow

The entire user experience from onboarding, into daily teaching/learning and expert customisation of Moodle is the core value of what makes Moodle useful or not in the real world, in fully online and blended modes.

While we’re working on hundreds of smaller, annoying issues, we are also doing some major re-thinking around what an LMS should be in the next decade and beyond as a tool to empower educators and learners.

Enabling all our developers

Our significant community of developers are an amazing group of over 1000 people - many of them make a living being part of the Moodle community.

We are of course working on ways to make Moodle programming easier and better, with better training and support as well as improved APIs, plugins, integrations and support for modern technologies.

However, a particularly exciting initiative is the new Moodle Plugins Service, due in 2021, which will provide an “app store” experience on which all developers can build financial sustainability for their work, while teachers will have easier access to use hundreds of new plugins in their courses via the web interface, without needing to convince their admins to install code. This will help the entire plugins ecosystem.

Better integrations between Moodle products

The current Moodle products already integrate with each other, of course, but there is much more to be done to make them work together more seamlessly, as part of one platform, so that our users have a better experience and also so that they become more aware of solutions to their problems.

Better integration with the world

Moodle is never used alone, and it is a part of many ecosystems at many levels. We must connect to all kinds of other systems, we must of course comply with new legislation such as the GDPR, Accessibility and much more.

In particular though, we are committed to helping to promote Open EdTech and to work closely with qualified Open EdTech products and major stakeholders to design and build an open architecture for a long-term future.

Roadmap timeline

2020	Moodle LMS	Moodle Workplace	Moodle Apps	MoodleCloud	MoodleNet	Moodle Certificates
Q1			Launch of new Moodle app plans	Launch of Workplace hosting Free trials
Q2	Release 3.9 LLTS (Long Long Term Support) New: Create H5P content MoodleNet Improved: Activity chooser Participants filters (MUA) Accessibility Safe Exam Browser	Release 3.9 New: Appointments Data Importers and exporters	Release 3.9 New: Text editor draft autosave Updates: Moodle LMS 3.9 compatibility Moodle Workplace 3.9 compatibility	Improved connections with other Moodle products Self-service for renames and restores	Release 1.0 New: Integrates to Moodle 3.9 and later Moderation Federation HQ-run home instance GDPR compliance Themeable	MEC 2020 launch 6 courses covering all 22 competencies Translated into multiple languages
Q3	Minor release(s)	Tenant-shared learning	Notifications of new grades Improved connections with other products	New: New plans Updates: Simplified signup and upgrades
Q4	Minor release(s)	Report Builder improvements	Functionality gaps for students UX improvements	Improvements based on customer needs		MEC Direct Release MEC licensing for large institutions
2021	Moodle LMS	Moodle Workplace	Moodle Apps	MoodleCloud	MoodleNet	Moodle Certificates
Q1	Minor release(s)	Dashboards
Q2	Minor release(s) Moodle Plugins Service Soft Launch					Other certifications
Q3	Minor release(s)
Q4	Release 4.0 New: Workplace features: - Certificates - Report Builder Improved: UX navigation UX biggest pains UX consistency via component library Information flow and task management	Release 4.0	Release 4.0 Improved: Moodle LMS 4.0 compatibility Moodle Workplace 4.0 compatibility Classroom tools with friendly UX	Release 4.0
2022	Moodle LMS	Moodle Workplace	Moodle Apps	MoodleCloud	MoodleNet	Moodle Certificates
Q1
Q2	Release 4.1	Release 4.1	Release 4.1	Release 4.1
Q3
Q4	Release 4.2	Release 4.2	Release 4.2	Release 4.2

Notes on some of these major release dates:

Moodle 4.0 in November 2021

Normally Moodle LMS major releases are every 6 months, in May and November.

However, for our very large new releases such as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and now 4.0, we often take longer so that we can tackle more significant chunks of important core work, giving us the opportunity sometimes to make more serious changes to UX or architecture.

There are a lot of ideas around for 4.0 - we will be relying on our new UX team to organise and prioritise a lot of it during the next 6 months.

Moodle 3.9 release in June 2020

In support of a longer release timeframe for Moodle 4.0, we have decided to release Moodle 3.9 in June.

The extra month will give us time to bring in a number of extra items in support of Moodle’s other products, which are in addition to the planned features for the 3.9 release.

It will also allow us to include as many community contributions as possible as we work towards the release date.

• Code freeze (no new features accepted): 4th May 2020
• QA cycle (start of QA testing): 11th May 2020
• Scheduled release date (once QA passed): 8th June 2020

Past releases

See our Releases page for information about past releases.

After Moodle 2.0 we switched to time-based releases rather than feature-based releases (see our development process). Because of this, the details above on future releases are an indication of current priorities only, and are targeted to be released in the upcoming releases. Anything not ready by the next release date will generally be pushed to the following major release.

See also

• Releases - versions of Moodle that have already been released
• https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Releases#General_release_calendar Key dates relating to future releases.