Current State

Moodle 4.3 will contain a new communications "subsystem" along with a new "provider" plugin type. The two components facilitate plugins to be developed to integrate Moodle with external messaging systems. Some of the features that can be provided by these plugins are room/channel/topic creation in line with Moodle courses. Enrolment and creation of students and teachers from a course into the room/channel/topic. Alignment of Moodle permissions in the external application, so teachers can moderate rooms for example.
A call to action is provided anywhere in a course or course activity to access the chat for that course.

Moodle 4.3 will ship with a provider plugin allowing integration with Matrix (Synapse).
Development is currently underway for a "generic" provider that will allow courses to be linked to arbitrary providers. This is for the case where an org already has existing room/channel/topics they are using and want to link them with their courses. It is less fully featured than the Matrix plugin, but allows linking to many types of communication providers.

Research is underway to add Microsoft Teams as the second provider plugin. And is currently in the API exploration phase.
There is also continuing user research to the greater role of messaging and communications in Moodle LMS.

Overview

Moodle's built-in messaging capabilities are limited. We know that messaging (including audio/video calls) can be a key part of the learning experience for both educators and learners, and so understand the imperative to build on and improve our experience. However, we also know that building a fully-fledged messaging system would take significant development investment – initially and ongoing – which would detract from our ability to build on other parts of Moodle.

For these reasons, we are exploring the opportunity to integrate other messaging systems into Moodle. The goal is to – over time – replace Moodle's built-in capabilities with a connector to other messaging platforms, such as Matrix, Teams, Slack, and so on.

There is strong alignment between Moodle and the Matrix project, and it is therefore likely that Matrix will be the first of these integrations to be built. We will also explore opportunities to make Matrix the default "out of the box" experience for new Moodle installs.

Preliminary considerations

• We know that we want to build this to accommodate multiple messaging systems – we do not want a tight coupling between Moodle and (say) Matrix.
• Matrix will, however, be the first integration that we build.
• We will build out a standard set of APIs which plugins can consume to provide messaging capabilities.
• The research we are undertaking will inform exactly what shape these APIs will take, and the functionality that they will afford.
• We will consider how to handle the existing messaging system – do we reimplement using these APIs? Do we simply put it behind a feature flag and indicate that it will no longer receive new features or updates beyond security/bugfixes? This will also be informed by the research output.
• This work does not consider chatbots or other "intelligent assistants". These should rather be considered separately – they may consume the same (or related) APIs to connect to messaging services without being tightly coupled to them. In other words, we may have chatbot plugins in Moodle working collaboratively with chat systems they've never encountered before.

Initial Research

• External Research Summary
• Dovetail research and user interviews
• Research plan
• Call for partner involvement
• LMS Messaging - Research Summary
• Integration of Messaging in Moodle LMS: Specification

Historical context

• Martin's rationale
• Martin's original first draft
• Bringing messaging into the center of the Moodle experience