The beauty of the open source nature of Moodle LMS is that it’s flexibility is unbeatable. It’s not just what you install, it’s what you make of it and the possibilities are endless.
Over the years, our clients – universities, colleges and learning focused organisations – have added Moodle LMS customisations to deliver more engaging learning experiences, improve learning analytics and streamline operations.
Here is a range of examples of customisations we have built for our clients who couldn’t find a suitable off-the shelf solution to meet their specific needs.
Course sharing solution for Moodle – SCORM Wrapper
If you are sharing courses with multiple LMS and not all your partner’s LMS support LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability), which was the case for one of our clients, you are not stuck if you are using Moodle.
Our team have developed a custom plugin – SCORM Wrapper (mod_scormremote) – which sits within our client’s existing Moodle site and offers direct control of their extended enterprise learning network (partners and users), when it comes to things like:
- Adding new and updating existing courses (SCORM Packages)
- Reporting on and maintaining user actions
- Monitoring course completions
- Managing subscriptions; and
- Managing the various levels of user access
In addition to being able to manage all the above more effectively, the SCORM Wrapper plugin delivers time and cost savings as a SCORM Cloud subscription is no longer required.
This Moodle plugin was developed in 2023 and has since been open sourced. It is now available to the Moodle user community to enjoy and has already been deployed on over 200 sites.
Learn more below:
Connect your enterprise LMS with other LMS
Moodle Plugins Directory: mod_scormremote
Content management / templating solution for Moodle – mod_cms
In response to our Clients’ need to have a more structured, flexible way to manage and deliver content at scale, Catalyst developed the mod_cms plugin. This plugin helps transform Moodle from a collection of individual courses into a more connected, structured, and intelligent learning environment.
mod_cms allows organisations to:
- define custom content types
- manage data sources like role types, and
- create content templates
By enabling custom content types and reusable templates, mod_cms ensures consistency across courses and departments. This is especially valuable for large organisations where maintaining quality and standardisation can otherwise become difficult.
Reusable templates and centrally managed data sources help with avoiding duplication and improving efficiencies; while greater structure also improves visibility, reporting and user experience for administrators, educators and learners.
Document converter solution for Moodle – Catalytic File Converter
Many Moodle conversion solutions rely on the web server doing the heavy lifting. In real hosting environments that can lead to:
- Unreliable previews when servers are busy
- Timeouts and failed conversions under load
- Difficult upgrades – conversion tools and dependencies are notoriously finicky
- Inconsistent behaviour across multiple servers
What we did differently for our clients
Our approach is designed for modern, cloud-hosted Moodle and delivers the following improvements:
- Conversion is handled by a dedicated conversion service (not your web server)
- It works cleanly with S3-backed storage (common in scalable Moodle hosting)
For clients, the benefits are clear:
- More reliable document previews and conversions
- Better performance and fewer ‘unknown failures’
- Easier maintenance and smoother upgrades
- Faster support, because we can see what happened and act quickly
Subject Learning Guides solution for Moodle
Our team worked with one of our University clients to help them streamline Subject Learning Guides creation, by developing a custom plugin which:
1. Extracts initial information from an external system e.g. CourseLoop
2. Uses generic information that Academics pair with more detailed course structures from the Moodle course itself
3. Allows to add other information manually as required e.g. course contacts, assessments, and weekly reading information
4. Produces a guide based on the materials above
Maintaining Subject Learning Guides that need to be updated every year, or even semester, from information that usually exists in separate systems, can be a painful and time consuming task. The custom solution we built solves this problem for our Client.
By matching the structure of the Learning Guide to the structure of the Moodle course itself, we delivered ongoing consistency, clarity and currency of content. As the educators are preparing courses for the next teaching period, course information is automatically being shared with the Learning Guides creator, and is always up to date and accurate.
In addition, once a Learning Guide for a particular course is set, a PDF is generated and saved. This means that there is an archive of previous teaching periods’ Learning Guides which can then be referred to if needed.
This solution saves Educators time while providing students with a better and up-to-date understanding of what to expect from a particular course.
Assessment Results Management solution for Moodle
We recently published a case study – Streamlining results management process using Moodle – a project we worked on with our valued client, Monash University. It is another excellent example of the unlimited potential that Moodle LMS, and open source software solutions more broadly, present to those organisations who value innovation and control of their digital destiny. Read more here.
Driving innovation through custom development
With custom plugin development and feature enhancements, organisations can:
- Introduce entirely new learning tools and capabilities
- Support unique pedagogical approaches
- Differentiate themselves in a competitive education landscape
Instead of adapting your strategy to fit the platform, you can adapt the platform to support your strategy.
How to realise your e-Learning goals with Moodle?
While Moodle offers unlimited flexibility, unlocking its full potential requires the right expertise. A successful customisation – one that will help you achieve your goals, or gain a competitive edge – is a collaborative effort between your team and technical experts who have deep understanding of Moodle. We recommend you work with a Certified Moodle Partner who has extensive experience working with projects of similar scale and complexity, and serving clients of similar industries, to yours.
Read: Take your eLearning efforts to the next level – gather the right team.
Moodle isn’t just what you install—it’s what you make of it, and the Catalyst team are here to help.
