A Pedagogical Evaluation of Moodle Extensions

Abstract

There has been a shift by the Australasian tertiary education sector towards open source Learning Management Systems (LMSs), in part due to the potential for extending and tailoring the systems using community sourced plugins. This paper reports on a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of Moodle extensions based on a six-month cross-faculty project conducted at Macquarie University. Findings included that despite over several hundred plugins and patches being uploaded to the Moodle Community website, the reference group only deemed nine of these as suitable for extending the functionality of the University LMS. The paper also describes the process and instruments that were utilised to evaluate the extensions themselves, which could be of interest to others making decisions about how best to balance the flexibility afforded by open source environment with extensibility within the constraints of complex and diverse institutional needs.