Hello all!

This morning we have released the following minors; Moodle 3.10.1, 3.9.4, 3.8.7 and 3.5.16. 

All releases are now available for download via https://download.moodle.org or Git.

As always, the minor releases include bug-fixes, as well as security improvements, and we recommend that you upgrade your sites as soon as possible. Upgrading should be straightforward. 

Administrators of all registered Moodle sites will receive an email with details of the security fixes and we'll publish these more widely shortly.

The release notes for each version can be found here:

• Moodle 3.10.1 release notes
• Moodle 3.9.4 release notes
• Moodle 3.8.7 release notes
• Moodle 3.5.16 release notes
  

Moodle 3.10.x and 3.9.x (LTS) are the current supported versions. 
Moodle 3.5.x (LTS) and 3.8.x are supported for security issues only, until May 2021.

Please see the releases page for more details.

The Learning Technologies Group (LTG) announcement of the acquisition of eThink Education represents LTG’s intention to move customers into the Open LMS platform, which is not truly Open at all.  Their extensions to Moodle are not downloadable, and not available from other service providers.  Once on their platform, it is harder for institutions or organisations to move to a different provider, or to their own servers.  This goes directly against Moodle’s values of openness.  Consequently, as of 18 December 2020, eThink Education is no longer a Moodle Certified Partner or otherwise associated with or recommended by us at Moodle.

Moodle LMS, the open source engine that drives and supports our loyal Moodle community, will always underpin our mission to empower educators to improve our world.   As the developers and custodians of Moodle LMS, we remain committed to innovation through the open source values of open exchange, collaborative participation, transparency and community-oriented development.

Ultimately, the closed methods used by LTG undermine the very core of our open source project and our collective capacity to improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide.

In contrast, our network of over 100 certified Moodle Partner companies allows educational institutions and organisations freedom of choice in hosting, product choice, vendor selection and protects ownership of their product.  Alongside Moodle HQ, the Moodle Partner ecosystem understands and interprets the needs of users to design Moodle based solutions and currently empowers hundreds of thousands of Moodle sites and over two hundred million registered users.

We remain, as ever, committed to this amazing open source project, the open education movement and our community.  We are excited to continually evolve all of our products and services to strive toward providing equity and access to our global community of learners in their life-long learning journey.  We have much in the pipeline, starting with huge UX improvements in Moodle 4.0 and we look forward to working with all of our community on new initiatives and enhancements to our core products and services in 2021.

Sincerely, thanks to everyone for your involvement!   

Martin Dougiamas
Founder and CEO

Our Moodle Educator Certification program, a six-course program for experienced Moodle-using educators, has been running succesfully through our Moodle Partners for some time now.

 We're now opening the program up to large educational organisations who'd like to facilitate the program themselves, with our support. The post MEC and MEC Direct explains about this in more detail, and if you are interested, you can apply from our MEC Direct page on moodle.com.

Hi all,

This is a notice to let you know that we’re making some changes to our published Moodle App product on the 1st January 2021, as part of our efforts to help improve the sustainability of the Moodle project.  Thank you to all those sites who have already helped us by purchasing a Moodle App subscription.

After 1st January 2021, sites hosted by certain non-official service providers will require a Moodle App Premium subscription or a Branded Moodle App in order for our app to connect successfully.  We notified those service providers in October so that they can minimise impact on any students and teachers who would be affected.

If you have questions on this, please contact us directly via https://moodle.com/contact/other-enquiries/?selection=forum#form.

Thank you for your ongoing support to our mission to empower educators to improve our world.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the recent Learn Moodle 3.9 Basics MOOC - our 14th run of the course!

Nearly 3700 people started the course, with 46% receiving a participant badge for posting in a forum and 21% (776 people) completing all 32 required activities and receiving a completer badge and certificate. Well done everyone!

Thanks also for all the feedback we received from participants, helping us identify bugs in Moodle and improve the course for the future. For details, please see Mary's post Learn Moodle 3.9 Basics: Feedback and Actions.

If you would like to learn the basics of teaching with Moodle but didn't have chance to participate in the Learn Moodle 3.9 Basics MOOC, you are welcome to sign up for our self-paced course, Moodle Teaching Basics.

I am pleased to announce that our Moodle translation tool, AMOS, on lang.moodle.org is to receive a major update including a rewrite of the storage system and improvements to the user interface. The update will significantly improve the performance of AMOS and better support our community of volunteer translators.

For details of the update, please see the discussion in the Languages forum AMOS update and temporary shutdown.

Hello everyone!

Next to today's wonderful new Moodle 3.10 major release, we have also released the following minors; Moodle 3.9.3, 3.8.6, 3.7.9, and 3.5.15. 

All releases are now available for download via https://download.moodle.org or Git.

The minor releases include bug-fixes, as well as security improvements, and we recommend that you upgrade your sites as soon as possible. Upgrading should be straightforward. 

Administrators of all registered Moodle sites will receive an email with details of the security fixes and we'll publish these more widely shortly.

The release notes for each version can be found here:

• Moodle 3.9.3 release notes
• Moodle 3.8.6 release notes
• Moodle 3.7.9 release notes
• Moodle 3.5.15 release notes
  

Note that support has ceased for Moodle 3.7 and Moodle 3.8 has entered security support only. If you are on either Moodle 3.7 or 3.8, now is a good time to plan your upgrades. 

Please see the releases page for more details.

I’m pleased to announce Moodle 3.10! Together with the community we’ve all worked hard on this release and you can read more about it below. At the same time, we’ve also made progress towards Moodle 4.0, which is scheduled for release in November 2021. The past few months have been a busy and exciting time full of UX research, prototyping and assessing technical feasibility of the UX improvements that will be part of the 4.0 release. Because we are working on Moodle 4.0 in parallel, Moodle 3.10 and 3.11 (scheduled for release in May 2021) are considered interim releases.

It’s wonderful to see the Moodle community continuing to contribute to the project, even when much of the world remains in the grips of COVID-19. Your contributions remain plenty, with Moodle 3.10 receiving over 750 commits from more than 90 developers in 19 countries! 

Not only have you provided improvements and bug-fixes for Moodle LMS itself, but you also contribute with translations, documentation and QA testing. Furthermore, many of you have been actively involved in helping us shape Moodle 4.0, by participating in our UX research through workshops and test sessions. You can follow the UX research, participate in testing and have a look at the latest designs.

I want to thank you all for your ongoing commitment to being part of this open source project.  I encourage you to help us continue to grow the project by getting more people involved where you can. Together we are making Moodle even better!

First founded in 1945, this year marks the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UN). Its 193 member states work together towards making this world a better place through taking action on issues such as peace, climate change, human rights and sustainable development. Moodle’s mission is to empower educators to improve our world by building the most efficient platform for teaching, learning and collaborating online. This is not only in line with the UN’s sustainable development goal (SDG) of quality education, but we also firmly believe that education underpins the success of the other SDGs.

Since the start of the pandemic, we’re proud Moodle is a part of the COVID-19 Global Education Coalition. Organised by UNESCO, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and it is aimed at protecting the right to education during a time where over 1 billion students have been affected.

Moodle is also used by many UN and UNESCO agencies, including UNICEF, ILO (International Labour Organisation), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) and the UN’s online examination and test platform for job candidates. For example, ITCILO, the training arm of ILO, uses Moodle for their online learning programs. ILO’s aim is to promote learning, knowledge sharing and training for governments, workers and employers towards the SDG of decent work and economic growth.

The Moodle 3.10 release is dedicated to the UN, to celebrate their 75th anniversary and recognise the contribution they are making to improve our world!

Let’s take a look at some of the improvements for Moodle 3.10, listed below. As always, for the full list please refer to the release notes. 

• Download course content; students are now able to easily download course content. This improvement is the result of collaboration; proposed and funded by the Moodle User Association (MUA), and developed by Moodle HQ. Currently, the download will contain the content from the File, Folder, Page and Label resources in the course. An API has been developed to allow this functionality to be extended to the other Moodle activities and resources down the track.
  
• H5P improvements; a number of smaller improvements including the ability to download and replace content in the content bank, to customise the style of H5P packages and it is now possible to save grades from embedded H5P content in the gradebook.
  
• Payment gateway; the introduction of a new payment system provides more flexibility and control for those who offer courses for a fee. Multiple accounts can be linked to a PayPal payment gateway, and the payment system can be extended in the future to allow additional payment gateways.
  
• Quiz improvements; a number of nice quiz improvements, including a quiz timer that scrolls down the page along with the user; a new completion option based on the number of attempts completed and the option to specify a maximum file size for essay type questions.
  
• LTI improvements; work has progressed on Moodle’s LTI 1.3 Advantage implementation, with the option to return multiple content items at once via deep linking and a simplified LTI setup process that uses dynamic registration to autoconfigure LTI tools.
  
• Improvements for administrators; including additional command line options to upload users and restore a course from a backup file, more information about running scheduled and ad hoc tasks to more easily manage them, and the ability to export and import your site’s local language customisations.
  
• Improvements for developers; including a new API for grade categories, performance improvements to the theme designer mode and a new behat step to help check pages for compliance with the WCAG accessibility standard.
  

Want to know more? Check out our Moodle 3.10 Youtube playlist (link coming) and our new features page, which reveal some of the other wonderful new features.

Keen to get your hands on Moodle 3.10? Go to our download page or reach out to one of our Moodle Partners who can help by providing Moodle services that complement the platform such as hosting or any further custom development. Updated versions of the Moodle App, MoodleCloud and Moodle Workplace platform will be released over the coming weeks.

Thank you all!

Sander.

A big thank you to all our Quality Assurance (QA) testers, as listed in the Testing credits, who helped us achieve a Moodle 3.10 test pass rate of 100% in 3 weeks and 6 days. Congratulations to everyone who received a Moodle tester 2020 badge for running three or more tests.

Thanks also to all our core developers, who helped with fixing bugs identified through testing, so that tests could be reset and run again. We are now ready for Moodle 3.10 to be released on schedule on Monday 9 November 2020!