Institutional Adoption of a Learning Management System in Higher Education: A Case Study of the Corvinus University in Budapest

Abstract

The development of the Moodle e-learning system started in 2002. Since it is an open source platform with a prominently rich functionality, the system has been introduced in more than 100,000 organisations worldwide in the last decade, including numerous Hungarian higher education institutions (Szent István University, Óbuda University, University of Pannonia) and many organisations in the public administration. We have been operating with one of the largest user (12,000 visitors daily) and course (more than 1,000 active courses per semester) numbers in Hungary, a Moodle based system since 2007 at the Corvinus University of Budapest (CUB) with a high level of user satisfaction. We managed a major, overall system improvement project at CUB in 2016. The development included a version upgrade to the newest Moodle 3, a full redesign, introduction of several new functions regarding the professors’ needs and core improvement on the system’s stability and security among others with a comprehensive load-impact test. In this paper, we discuss the success factors and pitfalls of the whole renewal process. We will further focus on analysing the group discussions with the major stakeholders and evaluate the comprehensive load-impact test. At the end of our paper, we will examine the state of the Moodle e-learning system at the National University of Public Service and we will propose elements of an improvement project relying on our recent experience at another university.