By Nick Sohr, Managing Editor, MDbizMedia

From a whirring hard drive in Tom Murdock’s living room in Timonium grew Moodlerooms, Inc.

The spinning drive told Murdock, then a high school English teacher, his students were logging in online to turn in assignments, read Murdock’s feedback and communicate with their instructor.

That experiment with a platform called Moodle blossomed into Moodlerooms, a Baltimore tech company with 85 employees, 1,000 clients across the country and a million end users.

“Our growth is explosive,” said Murdock, the co-founder and president of Moodlerooms.

The company supports the e-learning software that schools, universities and businesses use, and adds its own innovations in assessment, content management, interactivity and other areas on top of the open-source Moodle platform. Moodlerooms developers have also been working on a new product the company plans to roll out soon.

“I think we’ve succeeded in creating a whole new category of product, something that nobody else offers,” Murdock said. “We’re really thrilled about introducing that in the next couple months.”

Lou Pugliese, the company’s chairman and CEO, said the product “completely reinvents” e-learning design.

“E-learning and learning management systems are really only about 12 years old, but it’s the fastest growing technology in the history of education, quite frankly,” Pugliese said. “It’s very different now than when we built it in the late ‘90s. Educators and schools are looking for new types of applications. They’re looking for different designs.”

Moodlerooms was founded in 2005 after Murdock found himself running e-learning programs for other teachers, too.

Moodlerooms moved to Federal Hill two years ago.

Two years ago, Moodlerooms moved from the Emerging Technology Center to offices in Federal Hill, where most of the company’s 85 employees work. The Department of Business and Economic Development has invested $1.2 million in the company through the Maryland Venture Fund in the last six years.

Pugliese said he expects the staff to grow to 150 by the end of next year.

Moodle is the largest e-learning platform in the world, with a presence in more than 200 countries and 55 million end users. Moodlerooms is the platform’s largest service provider.

“Most institutions, higher ed and K-12, are looking to get into the open-source environment,” said Pugliese. “They’re looking to move off of proprietary platforms.”

The growth also reflects broader changes in technology that have put smartphones in students’ pockets and electronic communication tools, like social networking sites, on their screens. E-learning software allows educators to tailor instruction more closely to students’ needs while delivering the information in the mode to which students have become accustomed.

“It’s very difficult to reach an individual student. Every student learns differently. In a textbook classroom environment, it’s one size fits all. You either make it and understand it or you don’t,” said Pugliese. “What e-learning and digital content allows you to do is to redirect specific remediation activities to a student that doesn’t have the same kind of skill and competency that somebody else might have.”