Moodle Platform — Your Go-To Learning Solution! 🚀

Welcome to the Moodle Platform! Think of this as your quick guide to understanding what we're all about. By the time you've read this, you'll know the answers to these three super important questions:

What are we building? 🤔
Why are we building it? 🎯
How is the work organized? 👷‍♀️

1. What are we building? 🤔

We're creating a super-powered version of Moodle, the world's most popular open-source learning platform! Moodle is like the ultimate online classroom, used by millions globally to create amazing courses and learning communities. It's built on PHP (a common web language) and kept awesome by Moodle HQ and a huge worldwide community.

Imagine Moodle, but easier to set up, faster, and ready for anything! Our special version is designed to be:

Ready-to-Go (Turnkey): Like a pre-built house, it’s ready to use right away! 🏠
Cloud-Agnostic: It works on any cloud provider (like Amazon, Google, Microsoft) or even on your own servers – total flexibility! ☁️
Easy to Develop Locally: Developers can work on it easily on their own computers using Docker (think of Docker as a magic box that holds all the necessary tools). 🐳
Simple to Deploy: We deploy it to Kubernetes (k3s), which is like a smart manager for applications, making sure Moodle runs smoothly. We even have a custom "operator" built in Rust (a super-fast programming language) to help! ⚙️
Automated Setup: We use Terraform to set everything up end-to-end automatically. No manual clicking needed! 🏗️

What makes our Moodle stand out? ✨

Super Fast Performance (Thanks, Rust!): We've rebuilt some key parts using Rust to make Moodle run much, much faster. Imagine upgrading a regular car engine to a race car engine! 🏎️💨
Smart Kubernetes Operator: Our special Rust operator handles all the tricky stuff like "blue-green" upgrades ( updating without downtime!), automatic backups (so you never lose your work!), and automatically adjusting to handle more users (autoscaling). 🧠💾
Smooth & Automated Setup (CI/CD): We use GitHub Actions to automatically check, test, build, and deploy Moodle. This means less manual work and fewer mistakes! ✅🔄
Modular Design: Our Moodle is built like LEGOs! 🧱 Different parts (PHP plugins and Rust components) can be updated independently, making maintenance and new features easier to manage.

2. Why are we building it? (Project Goals) 🎯

We're building this enhanced Moodle for some very important reasons, aiming for big wins for both our team and our customers!

Faster Learning for New Engineers: We want new team members to get up to speed quickly!
Our Goal: Onboarding new engineers in 5 days or less. ⏱️
Consistent & Reliable Deployments: We want Moodle to be deployed the exact same way every time, whether it's for testing or for our customers.
Our Goal: No unexpected changes reported by Terraform for two releases in a row. ✨
Significant Performance Boosts: Make Moodle lightning fast!
Our Goal: At least 30% faster page loading for complex courses. 🚀
Top-Noch Reliability: Ensure Moodle is always available when you need it.
Our Goal: 99.9% uptime (that's almost always on!) and recovery from any issues in less than 15 minutes. 💪
Flexible Deployment Options: Make Moodle deployable in many different ways to suit various needs.
Our Goal: By Q4 2025, deliver and prove five different ways to deploy Moodle (like serverless, pure Kubernetes, cloud-only, container-only, or on your own hardware). 🌍

Moodle's Amazing Core Features (What it Does Best!) 📚

Moodle is packed with features designed to make online learning powerful and easy. Here’s what’s included:

Customizable Look & Feel: Easily change how your Moodle site looks – add your logo, pick colors, arrange sections, or even create totally unique designs! 🎨
Secure Sign-in & Easy Enrolment: Over 50 ways for users to sign in (like with Google, Microsoft, or your company's system) and smart ways to get people into the right courses at the right time.🔒
Multilingual Support: Moodle speaks your language! The entire interface can be translated, and teachers can even offer course materials in different languages. 🗣️🌍
Rich Learning Activities & Resources: A huge variety of built-in tools for learning – like forums for discussions, quizzes for testing, assignments for submissions, and resources like pages or files. This means endless ways to teach and learn! 📖✍️
Track Progress & Skills: Keep an eye on how learners are doing with completion tracking for activities and courses. You can also set up custom skill frameworks and learning plans to monitor mastery. 📊
Flexible Grading & Assessment: Easy-to-use gradebooks with different grading scales, smart ways to combine grades, and built-in tools like rubrics for fair assessment. Quizzes support tons of question types too! ✅
Collaboration & Communication: Moodle makes it easy to talk and work together with forums, direct messaging , announcements, and group tools. It also integrates with video conferencing tools like BigBlueButton for live online classes! 💬🤝
Powerful Analytics & Reporting: Get detailed insights into learner activity, track progress, and create custom reports. Dashboards help identify students who might need extra help. 📈🧐
Mobile App & Offline Learning: The official Moodle mobile app lets learners access courses on their phones, get notifications, work offline (like drafting assignments), and even interact with H5P content! 📱
Thousands of Plugins: Moodle is super flexible! Thousands of community-made plugins can add extra features for anything from gamification to attendance, plagiarism checking, and much more. 🔌

What's New in Moodle 5.0 (Released June 30, 2025!) 🤩

Moodle 5.0 is a huge upgrade, bringing over a hundred improvements focused on making Moodle smarter, easier to use, more accessible, and simpler to manage!

AI Enhancements 🤖

Custom AI Integration: Connect your own AI models using the Ollama API!
Flexible AI Settings: Set up multiple AI tools and fine-tune how each model behaves.
"Explain" Option for Learners: Students can now ask Moodle to explain content on demand – instant clarity! ✨
AI Policy & Usage Reports: Admins can easily see who's agreed to AI policies and track overall AI usage.

Content & Activity Management 📋

Activities Overview: New dashboards for teachers and students to see all course activities at a glance – super helpful for staying organized!
Centralized Question Banks: Create quizzes faster with a central place for all your questions and six powerful ways to filter them. 🧠

Accessibility & Editing ✍️

Longer Image Descriptions: Up to 750 characters for alt-text means better descriptions for visually impaired users. 👓
Improved Media Editing: Easily drag-and-drop media, use MP3s, and enjoy a more intuitive experience when editing content. 🎬

Assessment & Notifications 💯

Grade Penalties for Late Submissions: Automatically apply and display penalties for late assignments right in the gradebook. ⏰
SMS Notifications for Feedback: Notify students about their assignment feedback via text messages, including file details. 📲
New "Graded" Filter & BigBlueButton Grading: Quickly find graded submissions and manually assign grades to BigBlueButton video sessions.

Miscellaneous Enhancements 🎉

Pre-created Quiz Attempts: Boost quiz performance by creating attempts in advance.
Duplicate Custom Reports: Speed up your reporting setup by duplicating existing reports.
User Tour Exclusions & H5P Autoplay: Exclude user tours from specific categories and enjoy automatic H5P content playback in the mobile app.

With this latest release, Moodle continues to evolve into a more intelligent, accessible, and user-friendly platform—empowering educators and learners alike.

Our Rust-Powered Enhancements (The Extra Good Stuff!) 🚀

Here’s where our Rust magic makes Moodle even better:

Super-Fast Backup/Restore: Quickly save and restore your Moodle data with a powerful new tool. ⚡
Smart Auto-Scaling Operator: Automatically manages Moodle's capacity and database connections to handle more users or traffic. 📈
On-the-Fly Image Optimization with imgproxy: We use imgproxy to instantly resize, crop, and optimize images stored in Object Storage (S3/GCS/MinIO) for every device and screen size. This means faster page loads and perfect-looking images without manual effort! 🖼️💨
Interactive Quiz Questions: New types of quiz questions powered by WebAssembly for richer interactions. 📝
Accelerated Calculations: Makes complex calculations (like grading) much, much faster using Rust extensions – up to 3 times quicker! ➕➖✖️➗