This Saturday, August the 20th, it’s Moodle’s (aptly) 20th birthday!
2022 has been and is set to continue as a momentous year for Moodle. With the release of Moodle 4.0, one of the largest updates to Moodle in its history, which is soon to be followed by the release of Moodle Workplace 4. As well as the in-person MoodleMoot Global event, set to take place in Barcelona this September.
Away from the hustle and bustle, happenings and developments, we wanted to take a step back and in honour of the platform which has had such an impact on the lives of the people that have used it and, most probably, those of you that are reading this, take a look at the milestones Moodle has reached to get to this point.
The early days
Whilst working at Curtin University in 1999, Martin Dougiamas, Moodle’s founder, was trailing early prototypes of what would eventually become Moodle. It was then that Martin registered the domain name, Moodle.com. And in a 2005 blog post, he explained his reasons for choosing that name, which were:
– was an acronym
– was a word you could say easily
– was not common on the internet (so searches could find it)
– had a domain name free
You can still view the forum post that was mentioned here.
Research continued, and in August of 2002, version 1.0 of Moodle was officially released. A year later, in 2003, Moodle.org went live as the community arm of Moodle, with Moodle.com remaining as the commercial arm.
Growing fast
From its initial release in 2002, Moodle usage snowballed, and it quickly shot up to one of the most popular LMS platforms worldwide. To support a growing user base and make sure collaboration and community remained integral parts of the platform, in 2004, the first ever MoodleMoot was held in Oxford – more notably at a subsequent MoodleMoot a year later, the Mojito became the official MoodleMoot drink.
As the decade ended, Moodle saw an explosion in popularity, registering over half a million users in 2008 and then over a million users by 2010. This year also saw the release of Moodle 2.0.
With the release of MoodleCloud in 2015 and the first ever Boost Theme in 2016, now staples in the Moodle world, Moodle continued on an exponential trajectory into the 2010s. And by 2017, registered an incredible 100 million users.
The numbers today
Most of you will be aware that the incredible growth didn’t stop there. Looking at Moodle statistics, the numbers today stand at:
– 328 million registered users
– 171,000 registered sites
– 244 countries with Moodle used within them
– and 1.89 billion enrollments on Moodle platforms!
These numbers could easily rival the biggest social media companies, and it’s hard to believe what Moodle has achieved in these 20 years.
From everyone at Titus, we want to wish a Happy Birthday to Moodle; we can’t imagine where we will be in the next 20!
To learn more about our Moodle services, check out our page here or get in touch below.
