Research
This page describes why Moodle is used for educational research and what research activities take place in the Moodle community.
How Moodle Supports Research
There are a number of reasons Moodle is chosen as a platform for educational research.
- Aligned with academic ethos
The open source nature of Moodle, as a software project and community, fits well with the transparency needed 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. - 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 easily replicated on another instance.
Discussing Moodle research
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
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
- Moodle Inspire provides a framework to conduct academic research within Moodle