The European Commission Directorate General for Informatics (DIGIT) and the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) have launched a joint initiative consisting of a series of hackathons aiming to improve and contribute to open source projects that have an impact on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)

The first one, 'Get plugged into education!' with Moodle, will start on the 16th of May. It will address SDG #4 –Quality Education. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 600 million learners worldwide were forced to study from home. Many of them in developing countries had to abandon their studies due to a lack of appropriate digital learning infrastructure.

The open source project chosen to improve this SDG is Moodle which is a widely used learning management system around the world.

The hackathon will last for two weeks starting on the 16th of May at 16:00 CEST, with a kick-off ceremony online.

To improve the app and reach more learners, the objective of the first hackathon is to extend existing Moodle plugins for:

1. Mobile app – to allow users to access all Moodle functionalities via mobile devices.
2. Video conferencing – to allow users to easily access and switch to virtual classes.

Participants will work with Moodle mentors to establish concrete open source software solutions that can then be re-used through open source licensing terms and conditions.

Follow this link and get more information about how to register and participate.

Follow this link to register for the kick-off ceremony.

Read more in United Nations' news.