Six Companies Form the Partners of Open Source Educational Technologies (POET) Working Group to Develop Common Standards for Moodle Plugin Development
The nature of open source projects allow for massive growth in a small periods of time due to contributions from many developers. Like any large project or organization, one can imagine the difficulties that may arise to ensure that innovation in code is kept on track with a common goal and mission.
Moodle is the world’s most popular learning management system and arguably one of largest open source projects worldwide. To date, according to the COCMO model, the summation of total community efforts has been 773 years of effort with the first commit in November 2001. Over the entire history of the project, 531 developers have contributed code and in the last year alone, 196 developers have added new code putting Moodle in the top 2% of open source project teams.
With such a large group of developers one may wonder how everything is kept organized and moving forward with a shared mission. Moodle has done an amazing job of keeping comments and documentation together, in addition to vetting code and plugins that are added by non-Moodle developers. As the system grows and developers from outside of the Moodle partner network continue to build plugins and integrations to keep Moodle innovative—many have been concerned about the ability to ensure that development standards are met.
To address this issue, leadership from Moodle’s partner network have come together to support innovative growth for Moodle by increasing the number and quality of Moodle integrations. The Moodle Service Providers: Lambda Solutions, Nivel Siete, Remote-Learner and Blackboard’s open source companies (Moodlerooms, Netspot & Remote-Learner UK) are joining forces to lead this initiative under the working group, Partners of Open source Educational Technologies (POET). Part of their effort will be to create a set of rigorous standards and guidelines for Moodle development and certifications for Moodle plugins.
"The eLearning industry is rapidly changing so it is important that core learning platforms like Moodle evolve just as quickly,” said Shevy Levy, CEO at Lambda Solutions. By bringing together a collaboration with experienced learning companies we can help facilitate the innovation necessary for institutions to customize their own deployments of Moodle to better serve their unique needs."
In open source, collaborative fashion, the Moodle Partners are actively seeking participation from additional Moodle Services Providers and plugin developers to ensure that standards are both inclusive and expansive, covering all considerations. With the release of development and testing guidelines late this summer, the Moodle community will soon begin benefit from a renewed allocation of time to innovation and enhancements as overlapping efforts become eliminated. For more informaion on POET visit http://poetgroup.org/.
