Latest Moodle News

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’ and happy New Year to you all!

Like many of you, our teams took some time over the last few weeks to celebrate the festive season with their friends and family, but somehow still managed to smash out a ton of work!

We made great progress on delivering our Moodle Product Vision, which focuses on empowering you for life and delivering improvements designed to help you unlock your creativity, help facilitate collaboration and optimise your business & learning outcomes.

We are excited to share a few highlights of our recent efforts with you!

Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud

We are happy to announce that Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud. Providing our MoodleCloud Plan users with the opportunity to use their own domain name, this is one of our most highly voted new feature requests and we are thrilled to say that it’s almost here. 

Custom Domain Process 

Another Plugin will be available in Moodle Mobile Apps

In a wonderful example of collaboration with our Moodle Community, the ‘mod_checklist’ plugin will soon be supported in our Mobile Applications. This will mean that all the plugins available to our MoodleCloud Plan users will also be available in our app for the first time, rounding out the proposition for those users. 

Plugins in Apps

Course creation is getting simpler 

We’ve been thinking about how we can make creating course content in Moodle easier and help our users get creative. We started some deep dive research in this space to help us better understand how educators and learning designers create courses, what they need from the process and how we can make it better for them. 

We’ve also been working hard on improving how courses can be structured in Moodle to make them easier to navigate and provide more options for how content can be presented. 

Course Creation Discovery

Course Hierarchy Updates

Our most commonly used functions are getting better

Our activity icons and one of the most used functionalities in Moodle, the Activity Chooser, are getting a face lift. These changes are designed to help educators more quickly pick the right activities to include in their courses and make it easier for students to identify what they are working on easily. 

We are also improving the functionality provided in our ‘Browse User List’ page to make managing users faster and simpler. These updates will be incredibly helpful to Moodle Administrators who use this functionality day in and day out.

And, we continue our journey to enhance the functionality provided by our Plugin Directory, making it easier to search, find and select the right plugin for your Moodle implementations.

Activity Icons & Chooser Updates

User List Page Enhancements

Plugin Database improvements

More opportunities to learn Moodle are here

We’ve launched a brand new ‘Moodle for Learners’ Course on Moodle Academy, with functionality built in allowing the customisation of the course content for your own Moodle implementation. We’ve also got a bunch of new Webinars coming and are getting ready to launch our new Moodle Developer course soon too.

Moodle Academy Update

That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’, we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Products Team

by Aurélie Soulier.  

Dear Moodlers,

Happy New Year! I wish all of you, all over the world, a fantastic year ahead, filled with success, happiness, and countless moments of joy with Moodle.

As I prepare to conclude my journey as the Community Engagement Lead for Moodle HQ on Wednesday, I wanted to take a moment to express my gratitude to my amazing team and to every one of you.

While my focus will soon shift to a role outside the Moodle sphere, my connection to the Moodle community remains strong. I intend to stay engaged in various Moodle-based activities in my free time. I'll remain a member of the MUA and moodle.org, take part in the PAG, as well as continue work on a personal project (involving user tours) that I'm eager to continue.

I also want to share the exciting news that Olga Koenig will be taking over my role as the new Community Sites Manager. I have every confidence that Olga, leading the Community sites team, will continue to strengthen the community and uphold the values that make Moodle such a great project.

Thank you all for your support, dedication, and commitment to the Moodle project. Your contributions and collaboration are what make this global community so vibrant and impactful. It's your passion and commitment that make Moodle what it is today and what it becomes tomorrow. 

Best wishes, and much Moodle love to all!

Aurélie
Community Engagement Lead, Moodle HQ

P.S: I leave you with this Scottish song which traditionally marks the new year, but also refers to friends who recall the good old times. It resonates especially as I will keep my last 15 months at Moodle HQ, and the people I met along the way, a dear memory, and hope to see many of you again soon.
'Ce n'est qu'un au revoir.'

For old acquaintance be forgot And never brought to mind Should old acquaintance be forgot In the days of auld lang syne?

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to register for the first Moodle Academy webinar of the year “Generative AI and H5P” on Thursday 18th January at 9:00-10:00 UTC, which is free to attend.

In this session, we are delighted to host Svein-Tore Griff With, the founder of H5P, to take us through the process of creating H5P content in a fraction of the time it used to take with the help of generative AI. Svein-Tore will demonstrate how you can create fully fledged interactive courses in minutes with H5P.

This webinar is part of the course ‘Moodle Academy webinars’. You have to be enrolled in the course to join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.