Why the ENTER-CBL project chose Moodle for Challenge-Based Entrepreneurship Learning

Imagine a classroom where students do not just learn about entrepreneurship - they build it. They work in teams, explore real problems, test ideas, talk to stakeholders, and learn to make decisions under uncertainty. That is the spirit of Challenge-Based Learning: learning through real-world challenges that demand critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, and action.

But there is a practical question behind every great learning experience: how do we organize all of this in a way that is smooth, inclusive, and scalable across countries?

In the Erasmus+ ENTER-CBL project, partners from Poland (WSB University), Portugal (Porto Polytechnic), Turkey (Istanbul Aydin University), Romania (Romanian-American University), and an external expert partner (Businet) faced exactly this challenge. To run the “NextGen Entrepreneurs Course” and support teacher training in CBL, the project needed a strong digital platform - not just a place to upload files, but a true learning environment.

The real challenge: CBL needs more than “a place online”

CBL is dynamic by nature. Students create artefacts (briefs, evidence logs, prototypes, reflections), collaborate across teams, discuss,
present, and iterate. Teachers facilitate, give feedback, and track progress. That means the platform must support a living process - not only content storage.

So, the project defined two clear goals for the digital platform:

  • A CBL knowledge and resource hub
  • A space to deliver entrepreneurship education using CBL principles in practice

What the platform had to do

To work for CBL entrepreneurship courses, the platform needed to cover core functions such as:

  • A well-organized resource library
  • Collaboration tools
  • Easy sharing and communication
  • Strong search and navigation
  • Course support features aligned with CBL
  • Analytics and reporting

And equally important: the platform had to be inclusive, secure, mobile-friendly, reliable, and ready to grow with the project.

The big decision: build a new platform - or use an existing LMS?

At first glance, building a custom platform sounds attractive: you can design everything from scratch.
But the ENTER-CBL team took a step back and asked a more strategic question: would building something new actually help learners and teachers - or would it slow them down?

The project reviewed existing Learning Management Systems (LMS) and compared their capabilities, especially in the post-pandemic reality where LMS platforms became more than repositories and evolved into full learning ecosystems.

What the evaluation found

After reviewing LMS options, two strong candidates stood out in the comparison:

  • Paradiso LMS (feature-rich, strong integrations, reporting, gamification)
  • Moodle (widely used in education, flexible, scalable, and open-source)

Both are capable platforms. But the project had one requirement that carried major weight: open-source adoption.
This requirement mattered because open-source supports long-term sustainability, transparency, adaptability, and community-driven development in education.

Why Moodle was selected

Moodle emerged as the best fit for ENTER-CBL, not because it is trendy, but because it matches how CBL actually works in practice.
The evaluation highlighted several clear advantages:

  1. It saves time and money (without sacrificing quality). Building a new LMS is expensive, slow, and risky. Moodle is free and open-source, and already includes the core tools needed for CBL course delivery.
  2. Partners already know it. Most project partners already use Moodle institutionally. That reduces training effort, speeds up adoption, and makes implementation smoother. It also means the team can focus on learning design and CBL quality - not platform basics.
  3. It fits CBL’s interactive nature. Moodle supports structured learning paths, forums and collaboration spaces, quizzes and interactive elements, content management, reporting and analytics, and real-time communication.
  4. It is scalable, secure, and future-ready. The project emphasized security and privacy, especially in European contexts. Moodle benefits from regular security updates, community review, configurable access controls, and support for privacy compliance (including GDPR-aligned practices). It is also scalable and works well across devices, which matters for international and blended learning.
  5. It grows with the ecosystem. CBL is not “set once and done.” It improves through reflection, feedback, and iteration. Moodle supports this improvement cycle through analytics, reporting, and a large plugin ecosystem (including LTI-based integrations).

What this means for learners and educators

Choosing Moodle is not only a technical decision. It is a learning-quality decision.

For educators, it means less time spent wrestling with technology and more time spent doing what matters:

  • Designing meaningful challenges
  • Supporting student teamwork
  • Guiding reflection and evidence-based learning

For students, it means:

  • Clearer structure
  • Better collaboration
  • Easier access to resources
  • Smoother communication
  • A platform that supports the full learning journey - from challenge framing to final outcomes

What happens next

The evaluation also opened the door to the next stage of development: not reinventing the platform, but enhancing the CBL experience inside Moodle.

Future work will focus on:

  • Selecting the most suitable Moodle plugins and LTI tools for collaboration and interactive learning
  • Developing a strong evaluation framework to measure platform effectiveness and guide improvements over time

The story in one sentence

ENTER-CBL chose Moodle because it is a proven, open, flexible learning environment that lets the project focus on what really matters:
delivering high-quality Challenge-Based entrepreneurship education across Europe.