Part of my series on contribution to Open Source project.

Moodle is web-based open source learning platform aka. Learning Management System (LMS) written in PHP.
Most people encounter it as students or teachers at some academic institution. For example at the Weizmann Institution of Science
we use Moodle to communicate with students. Announce assignments, grade the assignments. It also collects the recordings from the lectures
and students can access the recording from their Moodle account.

I also encountered it at Azrieli College of Engineering in Jerusalem when I taught the Open Source Development Course in a semester.

The gap

One of the difficulties with such as application is that when you encounter a problem or when you miss some functionality you don't know why.

It is unclear if the problem you encounter is due to the decision of the local admins, due to using an old version of Moodle, or a real issue with that you also have in the development version of Moodle.

So you don't know if you need to ask the local admins to change the configuration or you need to ask them to upgrade the version of Moodle or someone really needs to send a fix to the developers of Moodle?

If you find out that it is really an issue with Moodle and you fix it, how long will it take till it is released and the administrators upgrade the local installation of Moodle?

So I guess, unless you have a long-term need of that Moodle it will be a hard sell to get you invest energy in improving it.

Steps to take

In any case if you as a student, teacher, or administrative worker encounter a problem, probably the best thing is to get help from the system administrators of the local installation or your local support people.

If they can't help then you might want to explore the various support channels of Moodle.

Who will contribute to Moodle?

Based on this my expectation is that only those who work as system administrators who install Moodle for their educational institutions will have any interest contributing up-stream
to the Moodle project. They have control over the installation and thus they can decide when to upgrade. So if there is an improvement in Moodle they are the ones who can bring that
change to the local user-base.

There might be a case to get a bunch of Computer Science (or programming) students and as part of their course teach them how to contribute to Moodle, but this needs investment from the teacher and maybe from the core developers of Moodle as well.

What to contribute to Moodle?

On the web site of Moodle you can find many Moodle communities in various languages. For many contributors probably the first step is to get involved in the local community and help them.

Maybe get involved with the localization (translation) efforts.

There is a link to the documentation, that, I guess, always needs improvement.

Moodle has a plugin system that probably means you can add features by developing or improving a plugin. So it might not be necessary to get involved in the main project to have an impact.