https://moodlemootdach.org/course/section.php?id=235
Disclaimer: I love MoodleMootDACH, It is the fourth time I have attended and I am a wildly biased commentator, read on to find out why.
I attended with my collegue from Catalyst-EU Mark Johnson. The 2026 event took place over 4 very hot days at ETH university in Zurich. There were a total of 309 attendees, with the majority from outside the German speaking countries. Moodle HQ also sent a large delegation.
Although organised by German-speaking countries the default language is English but announcements are translated in an ultra smooth manner. Moodle is a community movement as much as it is a software product. Although most Moodle code comes from Moodle HQ, every real world installation includes 3rd party plugins, most of which are freely downloadable. There are currently well over 500 million Moodle accounts globally (see stats.moodle.org).
The magic of Unconference
It is an “unconference”, which means the topics and running order are decided at the start of each two day block, which are DevCamp and BarCamp. The organisers create a framework and after that it is “self organising”. It is one of those things like Wikipedia, in theory it cannot work but in practice it works brilliantly.
DevCamp
The first two days are DevCamp which aims to create new working code and ideally have plugins ready to use by close of play. If you are running Moodle you are very likely to have a plugin that started life at MoodleMootDACH. People queue up to “pitch ideas”, and people form into teams of around 5 and work furiously to plan and build their projects.
At a time when the answer to every question in EdTech seems to be “more AI” there were only about 3 projects out of about 25 that were explicitly about using it, though I suspect most teams used AI to help generate code.
I find the atmosphere during development very special. To be in the room with smart people focussing, exchanging messages and occasionally chatting about what they are working on is a delight.. It is very common for the developers to have teaching qualifications and they bring a significant student focus.
DevCamp winners!
At the end of DevCamp attendees get to vote on the following categories
- Fancy New Stuff
- Improvements
- Daily Helpers
The Fancy new stuff
Moodle Quiz Activity Monitor
https://github.com/dpfahl-ms/moodle-quiz_livequizmonitor
This delighted me as over the last few months I had been dreaming of such an idea (is it wrong to dream of Moodle plugins?). I have been experimenting with the plugin and it looks very promising.
Improvements
The Improvements category was won by the activity Wizard, the team included Moodle founder Martin Dougiamas and I was amused to see they included their photo in the Github repo.
https://github.com/stefanscholz/moodle-tool_guidance
Globally a huge amount of effort is put into creating code and plugins with new features and capabilities and it is very good to see effort into making the existing system easier to use.
Daily helpers
The Daily helpers category was won by “Bring your support materials”
https://github.com/PM84/moodle-tool_sherpa/tree/develop
The motivation described in the README file says it all
“You have extensive support materials, but you’re not sure if your users can find them? Wouldn’t it make sense to integrate them directly into Moodle? With moodle-tool_sherpa, external links to Moodle help texts can be added to simplify access and increase the visibility of these materials.”
BarCamp
BarCamp is aimed at non developers, although running immediately after Dev Camp means plenty of developers stay on.
There were 49 BarCamp sessions with a strong theme of Assessment, Grading and Engagement with an emphasis on quizzes, question banks and evaluation tools.
One of my favourite sessions was by Alexander Bias presenting MDLShield https://mdlshield.com. This is a cloud service that checks plugins for security and other issues. Although it uses AI, it is created by people with a very strong background in Moodle and goes far beyond what any generic security or AI tool can do.
Marketplace
Rosa Viera de Almeida from HQ gave the presentation “From plugins directory to Moodle Marketplace”. This is a “Big Deal” (™). The place of money in an Open Source project like Moodle will always trigger debate. But it seems reasonable to offer ways for developers to make money from their efforts.
The 15 year old plugins database is now read only and is due to be replaced by the Marketplace on Monday 20 July 2026. I found a lively discussion on this topic dating back to 2015 and the idea has been debated extensively over the years. Marketplace will accept free plugins but there will be the option for paid plugins using the Stripe payment service.
The Q&A section of the presentation resulted in some lively discussions which have continued in various forums since the event.
Martin Dougiamas: Starting over
Martin Dougiamas, founder of the Moodle project gave a session that was effectively a keynote. Although he ranged over some wide philosophical areas linking technology and education, I was struck by his comments on using local AI.
“This presentation right now is like I said I made it with my voice talking to my assistant which is an open‑source AI model running on a laptop in my house and I’m connected over a VPN right now and m y personal assistant that I’ve been building most of this year is completely local – it’s completely running all the memory, all of the AI, everything is running local. ….”
“Because I can trust it, trust is the number one thing with AI, I give it more of my data. I love giving it data. I’m on chat sometimes just telling it what I’m doing – I’m doing this now, I’m doing that now, I’m doing this and it remembers everything.”
Wrap up …
These are the main organisers and I am in awe of their ability to make a complex multilingual conference run so smoothly and keep a positive outlook throughout.
I am already looking forward to MoodleMootDACH27 in Vienna, Austria. I have told myself that next year I will at least be able to introduce myself and the topic of any presentation in German…but I said that last year.