MootGlobal 2025: Community collaboration delivers real impact

Pictured: Some of the Catalyst Moodle team from the EU, New Zealand and Australia offices in red shirts at MootGlobal25.

Our Catalyst teams from New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the EU attended MootGlobal25 to connect with fellow Moodlers, other partners and the Moodle HQ team.

We recommend staying tuned to Moodle’s YouTube channel for coverage of any talks.

Three days of presentations delivered more insights than one article can hold. For now, here’s a snapshot of some of the takeaways from the event on the future direction of Moodle and the practical opportunities tertiary and corporate educators can act on right now.

Accessibility as educational quality

Pictured: ReadSpeaker on stage presenting Accessibility Legislation.

The ReadSpeaker presentation reinforced a message our team at Catalyst is dedicated to. Accessibility represents quality improvement, not just compliance burden. Whilst 16% of the global population has severe disabilities, 27% of EU residents over 16 indicate some form of disability, and 70% of employees don't feel comfortable disclosing disabilities to employers.

Accessibility considerations also extend beyond permanent disabilities. Someone viewing content in bright sunlight benefits from a high contrast design. Captions help users in noisy environments. Clear navigation assists stressed users during exam periods regardless of their typical capabilities.

Content strategy matters

Great platforms need engaging and accessible eLearning content, not just content. Conference discussions reinforced what we’ve witnessed many times before: institutions implement accessible platforms but then create content that reintroduces barriers. For example, videos without captions, documents without proper structure, dense text blocks without clear headings.

Platform accessibility and impact is minimised when content isn't accessible. It’s one of the reasons our own instructional design team combines evidence-based learning principles with accessibility expertise. Inclusive content is equally important for your learners. Read more about it in this article.

ReadSpeaker highlighted research that accessible courses achieve up to 54% higher completion rates, not just for disabled learners, but for all users. 

If you need support improving the accessibility of your LMS, our accessibility experts can help.

Implementation realities from the field

Pictured: Managing Director for Catalyst EU, Joey Murrison presenting on stage at MootGlobal25.

Managing Director for Catalyst EU, Joey Murrison’s presentation highlighted challenges familiar to many institutions. Self-hosted platforms are falling versions behind, with seven-to-eight-month upgrade projects; platform performance is touted as a problem. Yet what can be overlooked is how much governance and implementation can be the actual culprits.

It’s one of the reasons Joey’s team introduced “The Five S Test" as a model to overcome these issues. The Five S’s demonstrate that platforms must be secure, sustainable, simplified, standardised, and scalable. 

When platforms are stress tested against this, organisations often discover Moodle isn't the problem; inadequate governance around it is. Joey shared examples his team had seen over the past 14 years working with many clients, including 50% of the UK’s top 10 universities. These examples included queries running in themes, forums configured to email 600,000 users simultaneously, and manual course edits during quiz starts that drop caches.

Implementation decisions and lack of support for issues like these compound and create performance issues that platforms get blamed for. But they can be remedied, and it typically starts with expert implementation, development and support. When this support is in place, institutions that previously sought platform replacements discover that their existing Moodle excels.

If you are facing implementation or performance issues, contact our team to start overcoming them.

Supporting educators with practical tools

Our EU team also launched The Educators Pack which is a subscription bundle addressing common challenges institutions face when self-hosting Moodle.

After working with world-leading institutions globally, patterns emerged. Educators needed backend services for plugins like STACK (maths and sciences functionality) and Code Runner (programming assessment). Course backups consumed storage. Integration maintenance created technical debt. Administrative reporting took hours of manual work.

The Educators Pack provides these capabilities as a supported subscription service: STACK and Code Runner backend services, automated course backups direct to cloud storage, configurable reporting tools, dataflows for system integration, assessment management functionality, and the Cat Awesome theme with Hero course format for improved visual design.

The pack is available now to simplify and streamline your L&D processes. Let us know if you are interested.

Institutions fixing assessment together

Pictured: Moodle presents Catalyst with LMS Contributor of the Year award on stage.

One of the many things our team enjoy about open source is the foundations of community and collaboration. Accepting APAC Partner of the Year was a treat but sharing LMS Contributor of the Year with the Quiz and Question Bank team felt right.

The Quiz and Question Bank initiative represents one of Moodle's most impactful community-led developments. Twenty-three institutions, community leaders, and developers collaborated to fix assessment capabilities that millions of educators rely upon daily. This wasn't corporate-driven feature development, it was educators and technologists solving real problems together.

Congratulations to everyone who was nominated and won at the MootGlobal 2025 Awards.

If you want to team up with other institutions facing common challenges, our Moodle development team can connect you with potential partners and provide the technical expertise to make it happen.

Where we'll gather next

Moodle Ideas Exchange

MootGlobal heads to Istanbul in 2026 which is a great meeting point between Europe and Asia for our global community. The city's blend of rich cultural history and thriving tech scene, with top universities and exciting startups, captures exactly what Moodle's about: bringing different cultures and ideas together for innovative learning. MootGlobal is also shaking things up and rebranding as Moodle Ideas Exchange (MIX). Get updates about MIX26.

Pictured: Some of the international Catalyst Moodle team sat in the auditorium at MootGlobal25.

MootAustralia 2025

Closer to home, MootAustralia happens 24-25 November 2025 at Sydney Masonic Centre. Regional Moots offer practical opportunities to connect with fellow Moodle users, share implementation experiences, and learn from institutions solving similar challenges. Whether you're using Moodle or considering it, these gatherings help you understand what's actually possible beyond the documentation.

Our Catalyst teams will be at both events. Come find the sea of red shirts.