Collaborating for a Modern Learning Ecosystem
The Goethe-Institut – promoting language and culture worldwide
The Goethe-Institut e. V. is a globally active organization dedicated to promoting the German language abroad, fostering international cultural cooperation, and conveying a comprehensive image of Germany[1]. As part of its language courses, the Goethe-Institut offers online language courses based on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) at levels A1 to C1 (“Deutsch Online”) . The course formats based on materials developed by the Goethe-Institut are diverse: from supervised and unsupervised courses to individual and group formats, as well as blended learning programs. The courses can be taken as partial or full levels and are offered worldwide through the individual Goethe-Instituts[2]. Around 7.2 million visitors use the Goethe-Institut’s digital learning platform every year (as of 2025) [3].
Technical Foundation and Challenges
The “Deutsch Online” courses are provided centrally via a customized Moodle learning platform. The diversity of the course landscape and decentralized distribution currently result in a high level of manual administration and maintenance in the technical setup. Customizing and managing course content is complex and resource-intensive. Providing German learning content with the monolithic Moodle software leads to performance issues.
This is compounded by a high degree of individual customization of the Moodle system—such as proprietary activity types and learning analytics functions—as well as the integration of external services such as intelligent correction assistants and AI backend applications. These functions require considerable development effort in the context of Moodle upgrades.
Furthermore, with over 10,000 active courses worldwide, systematic, cross-course evaluation of learning and performance data is practically impossible.
The Project: A New Modular Learning Platform
Our team is delighted to be involved in developing a new, modular learning infrastructure for the Goethe-Institut. The aim is to solve existing challenges with a flexible and future-proof platform.
The concept and implementation of a modular architecture are being developed in close collaboration. The Common Learning Middleware (CLM) is being used for this purpose, enabling role-based access to external content and learning data storage and making this available to the course player. Another core component of the project is the development of an administration and provisioning system for courses. In addition, learning data is collected as learning records and aggregated in a meaningful way so that it can be made available to learners and teachers in a processed form.
The new learning infrastructure is being tested by an interdisciplinary team as part of a trial phase. We are eager to see the findings that emerge from this and look forward to incorporating them into further development.
© Header Image istock / Drazen
[1] https://www.goethe.de/ins/de/de/kub.html
[2] https://www.goethe.de/ins/de/de/kur.html
[3] https://www.goethe.de/de/spr.html