Source: Own Illustration
On May 26, 2025, employees of the IT Center and the Center for Teaching and Learning Services (CLS) traveled to Bochum for the 7th edition of the Moodle Community Meeting. Organized by Moodle.nrw, the event takes place every year at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB). It brings together universities from all over NRW for a series of presentations and workshops on the teaching and learning platforms Moodle and ILIAS. This year, 13 sessions took place, covering three main topics: the development of new features, the management of old data and the possibility of connecting ILIAS and Moodle with external platforms and tools.
Support Teachers in Designing Learning Spaces
One aspect of the community meetings are presentations about new plugins and functions that offer lecturers more and more design options. This year, the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences hosted a discussion on the topic of course templates.
One of the topics discussed was ways in which teachers can be taught how to use course templates and how templates can contribute to a low-barrier learning space. This provided a good opportunity to report on CLS’s experiences with the current test phase of course templates in RWTHmoodle.
For those who have designed their learning space without templates, the course audit plugin might be of interest. It was developed as part of the Miau.nrw project at RUB and analyzes the learning space to offer personalized suggestions for improvement for a clear course.
Learning Space Lifecycle Automation
Source: Ruhr Universität Bochum
Universities are also concerned about the management of old learning spaces. In RWTHmoodle, for example, there are currently 28,425 learning spaces. With an average of 3,500 new learning spaces per semester, it is necessary to delete old learning spaces at regular intervals to make room for the new ones. At RWTH, deletion takes place on one key date per semester as part of the learning space life cycle.
During the community meeting, RUB reported on its experience with automatic learning room deletion. Instead of triggering the deletion process manually on a specific day, learning spaces are scanned automatically several times a day. Managers are automatically informed on which day their learning room will be deleted and how they can extend it if necessary. This keeps the number of learning rooms low and makes support work easier.
Linking External Platforms with Moodle
Finally, several projects from universities in NRW were introduced that could be integrated with Moodle and ILIAS in the future. Among others, the JupyterHub.nrw project was presented, a collaboration between the universities of Münster, Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Dortmund and Bochum. The platform offers online environments for various programming languages. By integrating it into Moodle, teachers can link a Jupyter profile so that students can learn programming in different languages without having to install the required packages on their own computers.
The topic of artificial intelligence also had its place in the program, namely with the Open Source-KI.nrw project. In this collaboration between RUB and the University of Cologne, an AI chatbot is being developed for Moodle that could interact with the course content. In the process, particular attention is being paid to data protection. The stored language model is to run via the high-performance computing cluster of the University of Cologne in order to avoid storing data on external servers. With the help of the chatbot, students could have texts reworded and managers could create quiz questions without leaving Moodle.
After a small get-together at the end of the event, it was already time to head back to Aachen. However, the participants can already look forward to seeing each other again, as the MoodleMoot DACH 2025 will bring together universities from German-speaking countries in Lübeck at the beginning of September.
Responsible for the content of this article is Abigail Legras.
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