Cursive Launch Webinar: You're invited. 10/18 @ 3pm EST
I’ve been using the Moodle Learning Management System (Moodle LMS) since 2007 when I started learning the ins and outs of site administration, course development, and extending the already powerful LMS with additional community and commercial plugins. Over the last decade and a half I’ve worked with the site to deliver education to over 300k students taking college- and graduate-level courses for credit and certification.
From the very first days I used it, I could already see the power and potential of an open-source LMS for accelerating access to and decreasing the cost of education. Many in the Moodle community know me as a bit of a fanboy, having founded Moodlenews.com in 2009 where I wrote 1000s of articles about the events, feature development, plugins, and most importantly, the community that supports learners around the globe.
While familiarity and comfort played a role in selecting Moodle as the first of many planned LMS integrations, picking it was a no-brainer for many other reasons.
Userbase
Worldwide, Moodle is the dominant LMS by adoption, with over 166,420 sites and 394,576,611 users1.
This userbase is over 10x that purported by Canvas (owned and operated by Instructure), arguably the next largest LMS by users.
Regardless of the learning management system, teachers, staff, and students all have similar needs in education: the ability to verify authorship or protect academic integrity transcends the use of a specific edtech tool.
Extensibility
Moodle has a robust and vibrant extension database, exemplified by the plugin database hosted at Moodle.org. This extensibility is one of Moodle’s strongest attributes allowing schools, businesses, and individuals to mold Moodle with whatever features they need to facilitate teaching and learning. Moodle’s stable core is well documented with easy-to-navigate APIs, web-services, and other features that help companies like Cursive extend the capabilities of an already powerful LMS.
Ecosystem
The userbase and extensibility also have created a vibrant developer community over the last two-plus decades. Our development partners come with decades of combined experience in extending Moodle. They know how to leverage the existing code and features, how to integrate new features to existing workflows and interfaces, and how to package the code for easy integration by others. In addition, they understand the value of offering a plugin for free that still offers value2.
Recognized Quality
While Moodle has been quietly dominant for years, recently, it’s been earning the accolades and attention many Moodlers have known it deserves. This past year it racked up global recognition from G23, Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice4 as Best Estimated ROI, Easiest Admin, Easiest Setup, Highest User Adoption, Best Learning Management Systems, and Momentum Leader 2023 Learning Management Systems across several categories: including K-12, training software, and LMS (Moodle is not just for schools).
Community
Last but not least, Moodle’s community is amazing. The community of practice exemplifies this with 10s of 1000s of users at Moodle.org contributing freely to knowledgeable, reliably helpful forums across all timezones.
If ever you want to feel part of a team contributing to the educational opportunities of students globally, attend a Moodle Moot (as in Ent Moot5, a Tolkien-nod to the geekiness of the community and founder), one of the Moodle-focused events that take place around the world.
Conclusion
We’re excited to launch with Moodle and continue participating in the community.
If you’re curious what Moodle is like, try out our Demo which is running on and built within Moodle’s standard feature set.
And for those non-Moodlers, we look forward to bringing Cursive to every LMS to help you tackle thorny issues in academic integrity and support writing in classrooms.
- https://stats.moodle.org/ ↩︎
- The Cursive plugin is avaiable to download and install for free letting users manually run the Cursive authorship, diff, and analytics models without making a payment ↩︎
- https://moodle.com/news/moodle-earns-seven-new-g2-badges-for-excellence-in-education/ ↩︎
- https://moodle.com/news/moodle-earns-community-recognition-in-capterra-getapp-and-software-advice/ ↩︎
- https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Entmoot ↩︎
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