The respective volumes for each search term are shown below. (Moodle is the Blue line).

Whilst it can be argued that e-learning has become too general as a search term and that people are increasingly using more specific search terms, there can be no doubt about the growth of Moodle.

Over 50% of further education colleges in the UK use Moodle. My son's sixth form college here in Brighton uses Moodle as does my daughter's secondary school. In fact there are now over 19,000 installations of Moodle.

One company recently argued that Sakai is hot on the heels of Moodle which surprised us, so we typed both Moodle and Sakai into Google trends. The results were as follows (again Moodle is the blue line).

We have a lot of time for Sakai but measured in search volumes, there can be no doubt about Moodle's overwhelming popularity. In November, 2006, the UCLA Faculty Committee on Educational Technology decided that UCLA should converge on Moodle as the single open source platform for its common collaboration and learning environment (CCLE). UCLA commented "The decision to choose Moodle over Sakai as UCLA's convergence platform was based on many factors that, over time, led us to believe it to be a better match for UCLA's current needs."

Some companies have argued that Moodle is okay in education but is not really for the corporate market. We would not subscribe to this view. We have installed Moodle for 18 corporate organisations in 2006 and anticipate a lot more in 2007. Moodle does need some adjusting to work well as a corporate LMS but in our view with a little work it can deliver everything that a commercial LMS can deliver and more. It will be interesting to watch Moodle's growth in the corporate sector.

Congratulations to Martin and the team at Moodle. Another great Moodle year and now more popular than ever.