Can you tell us about your company and how you help your clients?
Catalyst IT: Catalyst IT is a global, multi-award winning Moodle Premium Partner with over 360 specialists across Australia, New Zealand, Europe, UK and Canada. We specialise in enterprise level Moodle instances and provide 24/7 technical support to our clients. The Catalyst team is trusted by major universities, colleges and other education providers, as well as Government and major organisations in the Health, Not-for-profit and Commercial sectors.
In addition to our highly experienced Open Source and Moodle specialists, Catalyst employs consultants who have experience in the Education sector. Having in-house technical experts who have worked in educational delivery means we understand the key needs, challenges and common scenarios of our clients, and are well positioned to deliver their digital and e-learning strategies accordingly.
Have you been to a MoodleMoot before? What were your impressions?
Catalyst IT: Yes, our team is a regular at Global Moot events and had a particularly strong presence at the 2022 Moot with eight people from the global Catalyst team presenting and more attending. The 2022 Global Moot was the best one we have ever attended. The breadth and quality of the presentations was fantastic with so many different specialisations and knowledge areas present. It was great to put many names to faces – people we work with a lot remotely. The organisation of the event was top notch as well. Beautiful venue, good amenities and Barcelona is just one perfect place for events.
How long has your company been working with Moodle?
Catalyst IT: Since Moodle’s very beginnings, so over 20 years now. Moodle is a big part of what has allowed Catalyst IT to become the multi-regional open source consultancy group we are today. We are one of the largest contributors to both Moodle core and the Moodle plugins library – being able to contribute to continuous improvement of the world’s most used LMS is a very rewarding experience for all of our team.
Do you have any great examples of how using Moodle has benefitted one of your clients?
Catalyst IT: Given that we’ve been in business for about 30 years now, there are definitely very many examples. Some of the best ones are of course the enterprise level Moodle instances we support for some of the world’s major universities and colleges, including Monash University (Australia), York University (Canada), Dublin City University (Europe), University College London, and more. Given the integration and customisation possible with Moodle, we are able to deliver our clients effective and scalable e-learning solutions fine-tuned to their unique needs; and some cases really are unique! A classic example of how using Moodle has benefited our clients is our eAssessment service used by Concordia University in Montreal amongst others.
Pre-pandemic, Catalyst and Monash Uni co-developed a Moodle-based platform to deliver an online exam experience fit for the demands of modern students. As the demand for “e-Assessment” grew during the Covid period, the joint development team were able to further refine the technology and deliver additional enhancements that ensured that it met the needs of Higher Education providers across a number of regions – including Concordia Uni. The rapid innovation that was delivered couldn’t have been done in any other platform than Moodle which provided huge value to our clients.
What recent work or project would you like to highlight?
Catalyst IT: One of the very recent exciting projects we’ve completed is a custom solution for our client Early Childhood Australia (ECA). The Catalyst team saw there was an opportunity for an innovative ‘out-of-the-box’ solution – a custom plugin to completely replace the need for ECA to use an external SCORM Cloud Service. The suggested custom plugin (instead of LTI) would accommodate the members existing platforms with minimal or no change. The plugin was built from scratch without losing any functionality that was already used by ECA in their usual course and user management processes.
Moodle SCORM Remote plugin offers direct control of the extended enterprise learning network and saved our client time and money. The plugin will benefit all organisations that offer extended enterprise learning via Moodle LMS.
“Really great work by our developers at Catalyst IT Australia, New Zealand, Europe and Canada,” says Ghada El-Zoghbi, Technical Director at Catalyst IT Australia.
“Getting code into an open source project is not a simple task. It takes a lot of iterative changes, coordination and cooperation with the upstream maintainers, clients and developers. Not to mention the project manager stress – fitting everything in the budget and delivering on time. Thank you Moodle for continuously recognising Catalyst’s global team effort.” We’re really proud of the teamwork and collaboration our cross-functional teams showed in handling the upgrade and migration process for all our managed hosting clients. Throughout this spring and summer, Catalyst IT Europe successfully migrated all Moodle clients to a brand new infrastructure, following the latest best practices, which ensures Moodle 4’s updated requirements are met. At the same time, we have also accomplished the task of smoothly transitioning all our clients to versions 4.1LTS or 4.2 during this time, so everything’s wrapped up for the summer! Great work, team!
What are you most looking forward to at the global MoodleMoot in 2023?
Catalyst IT: Our team is very excited to be a part of the presentations program again this year and to share their recent learnings and experiences with the wider Moodle community. We look forward to all the insightful sessions, to catching up with everyone we know and to meeting new colleagues. It’s also a great opportunity for the global Catalyst team to come together as we are spread around the world. Last but not least, we are very much looking forward to the big 80s party and are figuring out our costumes already. Can’t wait!
Is there anything else that you would like to share or discuss about your company, services, or experiences?
Catalyst IT: Our new clients are often surprised at how much access and transparency we offer to their Moodle sites; how we can optimise their site’s performance, and how much flexibility and cost savings they can achieve with migrating their Moodle site to our existing infrastructure on AWS Cloud. To keep an eye on all that using internal resources is a costly exercise for our clients and requires 24/7 monitoring.
Our clients appreciate and enjoy the break from all that infrastructure responsibility, have full access to their Moodle site and various data, and are loving the freedom to focus on what they do best – planning and delivering quality teaching and learning to their users.
It’s great to see that so many universities and enterprise level organisations are recognising the power of Open Source software – achieving sustainability for their projects and better quality results for their end user and their bottom line alike. It was definitely one of the hot topics discussed at various EdTech industry events we have been a part of this year.
How can people contact you if they would like to know more about your company?
Catalyst IT: Catalyst IT have presence in the UK and Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We all have our own regional websites but if you land on one of them, they all cross link to each other. Head to catalyst-eu.net or catalyst-au.net to start! Each of our regions also has a LinkedIn page. Find us there and click the follow button for tips, tools and latest news on everything Moodle and Open Source.
You can also always find us on moodle.com → solutions → certified service providers. 🙂
See you at the Moot!
