What does “modern” mean? The landing talks about latest technologies, but I don’t see how that’s a selling point. Moodle doesn’t really bother me, what’s wrong with it?
I used to work for a Moodle host that also did custom plugin development.
The Moodle code base dates back to somewhere around 2000 ish, and comes with the baggage of the early days of PHP. The Moodle code is full of "no guard rails" style functions, where you do things like write strings directly out as HTML and write direct SQL queries. Couple this with the 'plugin hub' not really have any acceptance criteria, and you get hundreds (thousands?) of security vulnerabilities.
I think there's been a push to modernize things in the few years since I left, but it's hard to update a codebase that old.
The project is still in early stages but we think we can contribute in areas like user experience, dev experience, accessibility, features & AI.
For example Collaboration can be great for teachers who want to collaborate live on documents (just like Google Docs), a Blocks-based editor (like Notion) would mean unlimited content possibilities, AI search can help students grasp notions easily..
Providing a better developer experience for people that want to develop on top of learnhouse or self-host it in something like Kubernetes & Cloud is a top priority too.
We're just laying the foundations of the LMS and we'll work on new features and guides soon, we would love to hear about some of your recommendations ^^
Is this targeted at large orgs? It seems like many universities use MS products that include user management. So, I’m not creating a separate account, but signing in with MS. Is that implemented?
Here is a killer LMS feature: instructor uploads PDF of this week's reading, and the LLM generates a 20 question assessment with randomized multiple-choice questions.
Or how about thinking deeply about assessment questions that are semi-resistant to LLMs? Justin Wolfers just did a webinar where he talked about visual questions (line moving) as being the most resistant economics questions to LLMs. What about designing from the ground-up to use elements that are LLM-resistant?
Do a really good job of implementing LTI (semi-complex standard) so you can instantly integrate third-party apps. Takes pressure off you to build every tool/feature.
The Moodle code base dates back to somewhere around 2000 ish, and comes with the baggage of the early days of PHP. The Moodle code is full of "no guard rails" style functions, where you do things like write strings directly out as HTML and write direct SQL queries. Couple this with the 'plugin hub' not really have any acceptance criteria, and you get hundreds (thousands?) of security vulnerabilities.
I think there's been a push to modernize things in the few years since I left, but it's hard to update a codebase that old.