Mike Churchward
Director of Engineering at Poet Open Source
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolMike Churchward is a seasoned engineering leader and open source advocate with decades of experience building e‑learning platforms and teams, currently focused on improving Moodle and related integrations. He founded Canada’s first Moodle Partner and later led product and engineering at Remote‑Learner and Brickfield, blending entrepreneurial POV with enterprise delivery. As Executive Director of POET Open Source he drives practical, community‑focused contributions—ranging from backend questionnaire enhancements to accessibility and core refactors in the flagship moodle project. He combines hands‑on full‑stack development with strategic program building, particularly around LMS interoperability and learning technologies. Based in Waterloo, Mike pairs a long technical pedigree with a knack for marshaling cross‑organizational resources to sustain open source education software.
10 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
B.A., Computer Science, B.A., Computer Science at University of Guelph
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
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Github Skills (13)
accessibility10
php10
moodle10
databases9
database9
unit-testing9
api8
apidoc8
version-control7
html6
javascript6
css5
mysql4
Programming languages (1)
Github contributions (5)
PoetOS/moodle-mod_questionnaire
Jan 2018 - Jan 2023
Questionnaire module for Moodle - Contributed module
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:139 reviews, 61 commits, 235 PRs in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the Moodle questionnaire module. Their work included enhancing notification features, specifically adding the functionality for full submission notifications. Additionally, the user addressed and fixed issues related to date handling within the CSV unit tests, and incorporated changes to maintain compliance with Moodle's versioning requirements. This also included restructuring code to align with new Moodle versions.
moodle
moodle/moodle
Apr 2021 - Jan 2022
Moodle - the world's open source learning platform
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:48 commits in 9 months
Contributions summary:Mike's commits primarily focus on enhancements to the accessibility toolkit within the Moodle platform. They implemented changes to ensure proper language string casing, correct navigation, and the addition of settings page titles. The user also refactored code by moving plugins to core files and corrected image display within the block. Furthermore, they added and updated language strings, and improved instance name displays within the error lists.
moodle
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