by Martin Dougiamas.  

The Learning Technologies Group (LTG) announcement of the acquisition of eThink Education represents LTG’s intention to move customers into the Open LMS platform, which is not truly Open at all.  Their extensions to Moodle are not downloadable, and not available from other service providers.  Once on their platform, it is harder for institutions or organisations to move to a different provider, or to their own servers.  This goes directly against Moodle’s values of openness.  Consequently, as of 18 December 2020, eThink Education is no longer a Moodle Certified Partner or otherwise associated with or recommended by us at Moodle.

Moodle LMS, the open source engine that drives and supports our loyal Moodle community, will always underpin our mission to empower educators to improve our world.   As the developers and custodians of Moodle LMS, we remain committed to innovation through the open source values of open exchange, collaborative participation, transparency and community-oriented development.

Ultimately, the closed methods used by LTG undermine the very core of our open source project and our collective capacity to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.

In contrast, our network of over 100 certified Moodle Partner companies allows educational institutions and organisations freedom of choice in hosting, product choice, vendor selection and protects ownership of their product.  Alongside Moodle HQ, the Moodle Partner ecosystem understands and interprets the needs of users to design Moodle based solutions and currently empowers hundreds of thousands of Moodle sites and over two hundred million registered users.

We remain, as ever, committed to this amazing open source project, the open education movement and our community.  We are excited to continually evolve all of our products and services to strive toward providing equity and access to our global community of learners in their life-long learning journey.  We have much in the pipeline, starting with huge UX improvements in Moodle 4.0 and we look forward to working with all of our community on new initiatives and enhancements to our core products and services in 2021.

Sincerely, thanks to everyone for your involvement!   

Martin Dougiamas
Founder and CEO