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Martin Dougiamas no longer works at Moodle. He remains chairman and a major shareholder, but his work on the future of education and AI is now independent of the company he founded.

Martin said this near the beginning of his keynote at MoodleMoot Europe in Barcelona last week. He left two months earlier, explaining that the research he wanted to pursue did not fit particularly well within Moodle HQ. Partner Avetica had already reported on his farewell, but this is a consequential change that has received remarkably little attention.

In Big Changes Afoot at Moodle in 2023, I described Martin's planned move from CEO to Head of Research, exploring technologies that could inform Moodle's longer-term direction. Scott Anderberg subsequently became CEO. Martin told me he will continue to be part of the Moodle community.

Before getting into what this means for Moodle today, some recognition is in order. Along the lines of Matt Pittinsky’s The LMS at 30, Martin belongs among the people who helped define the category. Moodle gave institutions around the world an LMS they could run, modify, and support through a community and network of providers. It made online learning infrastructure available in places and circumstances that commercial vendors often struggled to serve. Many people built that software and community, but Martin's contribution to creating and sustaining it was enormous, and in my opinion, viable elearning infrastructure exists in a large portion of the world because of the Moodle vision.

Moodle HQ should have done a better job explaining this transition and acknowledging Martin's contribution. Leaving people to piece it together serves neither Martin nor the company particularly well.

The transition provides useful context for the conference itself. Scott is coming into his own as CEO, and his keynote on sovereignty was the most strategically interesting part of the event.

Sovereignty was everywhere at this conference. In quite a few conversations, it sounded like a new label for the open source arguments of the 2000s. We own the code. We can host it ourselves. We are not dependent on a proprietary vendor. All familiar, and all relevant, but repeating those points does not explain how an institution should respond to the changes happening now.

Scott's keynote went further. He traced how sovereignty evolved from the authority of monarchs to states, communities, and individuals, then brought the discussion down to a question people could use: “Who gets to decide?”

For an institution choosing software, he organized that question around three decisions:

The important extension was the ability to change those decisions. An institution might choose a managed service today and another provider later. It might use one AI model and replace it when capabilities, costs, or terms change. It might decide that a previously acceptable dependency has become a problem. What practical options does it have then?

That gives Moodle a way to reach institutions that care about these choices without necessarily caring about the history of open source. In June I argued that AI sovereignty was becoming an EdTech issue, with an opportunity for vendors offering credible answers about dependence and continuity. Scott supplied a basis for Moodle to make that case.

Afterward, I told Scott that I did not think he realized how good, and potentially how important, his keynote was. Moodle has spent years trying to reconcile a community protective of its traditions with a company that needs to make harder product and business decisions. This sovereignty framing could be the lynchpin, but I am not convinced that Moodle HQ will build out a bold new vision.

Scott also challenged the idea that writing sovereignty policies necessarily produces sovereignty. Europe wants to avoid being beholden to American Big Tech companies, but it also loves policies and regulations über alles. Think of GDPR: cookie approvals that no one reads, horrible website experiences, and burdensome compliance for startups. The big risk is that Europe will take an important concept of sovereignty in the AI age and GDPR it.

Marie Achour, Moodle's Chief Product Officer, and her team deserve credit for continuing to address problems in the core product. The detailed Moodle 5.3 session and her keynote described useful changes, some already in the product and others further out on the roadmap.

The new design system should also make it easier for Moodle and plugin developers to produce consistent experiences.

Marie framed the academic roadmap around “learning worth having.” Her argument was that AI makes producing a course easier, but does not ensure that it is a good course. Moodle should help educators design for learning, with better alignment and assessment. That is a reasonable response to the explosion of generated content.

The academic product vision, however, has become less clear since last year. In her 2025 conference coverage, Morgan wrote:

One of those proposed offerings was Moodle Higher Ed. But Marie did not mention it in her keynote this year, and offline she described HQ as rethinking the vision and effectively putting it on hold (my words, not hers).

The product eggs are not getting broken.

Moodle Workplace makes this harder to understand. It demonstrates that Moodle can package its platform around a specific set of organizational needs and build a commercial product around them. Some higher education institutions already use Workplace, and the conference included changes intended to make that use easier. But the question about a compelling offering for academic, course-based learning remains.

Moodle appears to be caught in what I called the “100 Million Learner Paradox” in last year's Open edX coverage. Moodle boasts over 500 million registered users, yet I continue to hear from institutions and partners about the difficulty of getting universities and training providers to adopt it. How can a platform with such massive reach still struggle to find additional adoption?

Nor is this just about winning new customers. UNSW Sydney is moving from Moodle to D2L Brightspace in a transformation covering more than 80,000 students. Deputy Vice-Chancellor Sarah Maddison described the situation UNSW faces.

More specifically, UNSW needs:

This is the transformation so many colleges and universities need. I fear that Moodle is letting the dopamine hits of 500 million+ registered users keep it from seeing what is needed in today's academic markets. Protecting the big base by avoiding the leading edge is a valid strategy. But UNSW is a reminder that the base does not necessarily stay put, and a higher ed facing existential challenges needs new levels of thinking from product companies.

The distinction between Moodle LMS and Workplace also appeared in the AI discussion. AI will remain optional and delivered through integrations in Moodle LMS, while Workplace could incorporate more native functionality. Some Moodle installations operate with unreliable electricity and connectivity; requiring AI for core teaching and learning would undermine those uses.

The AI subsystem is adding support for developers' own actions, richer conversations, and coordination of more complex AI activity. Choice of providers and visibility into AI use also matter for sovereignty.

But the talk stayed mostly within how to add and manage AI inside Moodle. I heard much less about how AI might change the experience of using Moodle, or what HQ wants partners to build beyond today's workflows. Keeping AI optional still leaves room for a university or partner to build a different experience on the platform. Is the subsystem helping them do that, or are they having to work around it?

Martin's keynote explored how AI might change the learning experience. He discussed interfaces generated on demand and a learner-controlled coach connecting to institutional systems. Moodle could continue holding content, applying policies, and issuing credentials while learners interacted through their own software—the possibility I explored in The Left Column Isn't Permanent.

Parts of Martin's presentation struck me as utopian, but he was thinking about what the future might look like. Moodle’s product roadmap appears to assume that much of today's experience will continue.

Martin's research was originally supposed to inform Moodle's long-term roadmap. With him now working independently, who inside HQ is responsible for connecting that kind of experimentation to the product?

There was a part of the conference where HQ's willingness to make firmer choices was much clearer: certified integrations.

Standard certification, Plus, and Premium offer increasing visibility and closer commercial relationships, including co-selling at the Premium level. The program emphasizes accessibility, usability, and security audits, plus compatibility across Moodle upgrades.

HQ is setting more explicit expectations for the tools operating within Moodle, then helping selected providers reach customers. That gives integration companies a reason to invest in the relationship beyond being compatible with the LMS.

The marketplace, launched in July to replace an aging directory, aims to make plugins easier to find, evaluate, and purchase. Marie described weekly improvements and faster responses to feedback. There was more urgency here.

Brightspace Apps and Canvas Apps show that other vendors are also putting more structure around their integrations. These moves can make third-party tools easier to adopt while increasing the platform company's influence over how they reach customers. The commercial implications deserve attention alongside the technical benefits.

For Moodle, this is one way to make Scott's argument useful. An institution gets more value from choice when it can identify dependable tools and obtain support without assembling everything itself. Certification can reduce that burden. The ability to change providers and tools still needs to remain practical as the commercial relationships become tighter.

In 2023, I described Moodle becoming a product company and set out things to watch: a more competitive academic course experience, stronger participation in institutional evaluations, and a new CEO who would sustain change.

This year's conference gave me more confidence in the CEO part of that argument. I also saw useful core improvements and a more assertive approach to the ecosystem.

Scott gave Moodle a reason to change without abandoning its values. Now HQ has to decide what that means for the academic product.

I will return to the wider European sovereignty discussion and AI resistance in a separate post.

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