by Mary Cooch.  

Our Learn Moodle Basics MOOC  (Massive Open Online Course) started yesterday, 13 January, on learn.moodle.org and is now in progress, using Moodle 3.8

Learn Moodle 3.8 Basics is for anyone who wants to use the Moodle learning platform for teaching, whether in a school, a university, a company or just personal interest. In this 4 week MOOC, learners will explore  the different functionalities in Moodle and also create their own quizzes, assignments, and many more.

There is still time to sign up now and explore the features of Moodle 3.8 As with our previous MOOCs, if you would like to help out in the forums, please sign up too. Any support you can give to new Moodlers will be very much appreciated.

If you prefer to access the MOOC via mobile, you can also participate using our branded Learn Moodle app - available for Android or iOS. 

by Sander Bangma.  

Dear all!

Moodle 3.8.1, 3.7.4, 3.6.8 and 3.5.10 have been released. These new minor releases are now available for download via https://download.moodle.org or Git.

The releases include bug-fixes (all versions), as well as security improvements (v3.8.1 only), 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 3.8.1 release notes
• Moodle 3.7.4 release notes
• Moodle 3.6.8 release notes
• Moodle 3.5.10 release notes

Please see the releases page for more details.

by Mary Cooch.  

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle HQ is running another Learn Moodle Basics MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), starting on 13 January 2020.

 Learn Moodle 3.8 Basics is for anybody who wants to use the Moodle learning platform for teaching, whether it be in a school, a university, a company or just personal interest. In this 4-week MOOC, learners will explore many of the features in Moodle and have the chance to create a practice course of their own. 

 If you're interested, please sign up here: learn.moodle.org

You'll receive a reminder before the course begins. Finally, many thanks to everyone who participated in our previous MOOC. Please see Learn Moodle 3.7 Basics Feedback and Actions for details of how we are using your feedback to improve the course for future participants.

by Helen Foster.  

A big thank you to all our Quality Assurance (QA) testers, as listed in the Testing credits, who helped us achieve a Moodle 3.8 test pass rate of 100% in 4 weeks and 4 days. Congratulations to everyone who received a Moodle tester 2019 badge for running three or more tests in the QA cycle.

Thanks also to all our core developers, who helped with fixing bugs identified through testing, so that tests could be reset and run again as quickly as possible. Thus we are ready for Moodle 3.8 to be released on Monday 18 November 2019.

by Sander Bangma.  

Dear all,

It’s hard to believe it has already been 6 months since the release of Moodle 3.7. Time has flown as we’ve worked together with the wider Moodle community on the new release. And I’m proud to say that today we are releasing Moodle 3.8!

This release introduces many exciting new features and improvements, but before I highlight these I want to reflect on a very important group within our Moodle community; our volunteer translators.

Moodle translations and 3.8 dedication

Did you know that Moodle is being translated in over 130 different languages (not counting dialects)? They are all in various levels of completeness, and usually start with the most-commonly used areas in Moodle, but at least 30 languages have more than 80% coverage. At the time of writing this, a mind-boggling number of more than 1.7 million language strings have been translated by the community. You can see the list of amazing translators on our credits page. Helped by your efforts Moodle is used in every country in the world! 

We are very grateful for all the time and effort volunteered by so many people around the world. You are all contributing to our mission of empowering educators! In terms of translations, no one has put in greater effort than Koen Roggemans. Koen has been our official Moodle translation coordinator since 2004 and has tirelessly worked on the Dutch translation, coordinating and helping other translation efforts, all whilst skillfully collaborating with all stakeholders. Koen, as thank you for your wonderful contribution to the Moodle platform and global community, we are dedicating this release to you!

For anyone who wants to help translating Moodle into their language, please have a look at our translation guide.

Moodle 3.8: New features

Packed with many improvements and new features, here are the key highlights for Moodle 3.8:

• H5P; in collaboration with Joubel, the creators of H5P, Moodle 3.8 sees the first phase of our H5P integration come to fruition. You can now upload H5P activities from the Atto editor and we’ve introduced a new filter that will automatically recognise H5P URLs from trusted sites. The H5P content can be displayed from within Moodle without requiring any additional plugins. We will continue to build on this integration for our next release as we work towards bringing creation of graded H5P activities into the Moodle platform. Until then, you are able to use the existing H5P plugin for creation of H5P content, or create your content at H5P.org and upload it to your Moodle site!
  
  
• Forum improvements; a continuation of our collaborative effort with the Moodle User Association that started for Moodle 3.7. We are now introducing a range of new features that make Moodle Forums substantially more powerful. Teachers are now able to grade their students’ forum contributions with the introduction of the forum grader functionality. Student activity can be reviewed with the new forum summary report and forum content can be exported for further analysis. We have also introduced a new user preference where you can select to use a new design for the nested discussion view. Try it out and let us know what you think!
  
  
• Improvements to learning analytics; Moodle 3.8 introduces new models to help identify students who haven’t logged into the course yet, or students who haven’t logged in for some time. Helping teachers identify students who could benefit from being reached out to. It is now also possible to apply bulk actions to insights. A new insight results report provides a summary of the insights that were generated and how they were used and it is now also possible to run the machine learning algorithms from a separate server to reduce load on the main Moodle server. Do you want to know more about Moodle Learning Analytics or share your experiences and results? Please join our Learning Analytics Working Group!
   
• New emojis! Enjoy improved communication through Moodle by benefiting from a full range of emojis, exactly like you use on your phone. These can be browsed and used within Moodle Messaging as well as from the Atto text editor.
  
  
• Course overview; system administrators now have the ability to configure which layout options are available to the user (card, list, summary). It is now also possible to create your own course filter options using a custom course field. This means you can create filters for learning programs, lecture terms or anything that you easily want to make available to your teachers and students.  Thanks to a number of people working together, including Alexander Bias from Ulm University and our Moodle Partners.
  
  
• Question bank: question IDs and tags are now shown next to the question name, making it easier to manage and organise your questions. Thanks to Mahmoud Kassaei and Tim Hunt from Open University.
  
  
• Back-up: it is now possible to exclude files from the back up making it much quicker when doing a backup followed immediately by a restore. The order in which courses are backed up is also improved ensuring that those new and most recently modified courses are prioritised. 
  
  
• Assignment grading: uploaded images are now automatically rotated saving you time while grading.

The backup and assignment grading improvements are thanks to work done by Matt Porritt, Brendan Heywood, Dmitrii Metelkin, Nathan Nguyen and Mark Nelson on behalf of a Moodle Partner, Catalyst.

There are many more improvements and I can’t mention them all, so please have a look at the overview video below and our new features page. For more details the release notes page is a good start.

This release is once again showcasing the power of open source, with over 1300 commits from around 100 contributors in over 16 countries it truly is a global effort. A big thank you to our community who have contributed with improvements, bug-fixes, translation, documentation, QA testing, providing their valuable feedback and so much more!

[INSERT LINK TO VIDEO]

You can download Moodle 3.8 from our download page or please reach out to one of our Moodle Partners. We will be releasing updated versions of the Moodle App and MoodleCloud platform for Moodle 3.8 over the next few weeks.

Thank you all,

Sander.

by Sander Bangma.  

Hello everyone!

We have just released Moodle 3.7.3, 3.6.7 and 3.5.9. As per usual, these are now available for download via https://download.moodle.org or Git.

The 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 3.7.3 release notes
• Moodle 3.6.7 release notes
• Moodle 3.5.9 release notes

Please see the releases page for more details.

by Sander Bangma.  

Hi All,

We're in the final weeks of getting Moodle 3.8 ready for the scheduled release date of November 18th. As part of our release cycle we are completing QA testing. We are currently 54% through our test suite and looking for additional people who can help test new Moodle features.

Do you want to be a part of the Moodle 3.8 release?

Can you help with QA testing? Please see our QA testing page for information on how you can participate!

Be in our top 10 community QA testers and receive a Moodle t-shirt as reward!

by Mary Cooch.  

We’re pleased to announce that Moodle 3.8 will include the first stage of integrating H5P into Moodle. Just like Moodle, H5P is an open source project and it enables users to include interactive content in their courses.

Listening to our community, it became clear that integrating H5P functionality into Moodle would be very welcome, and so our Moodle HQ developers have been working closely with Joubel, the creators of H5P, to make this happen.

Moodle 3.8 will include:

• an H5P player
• an H5P button in the Atto editor - enabling H5P content to be added everywhere that Atto is used
• a filter to automatically convert H5P URLs to embed code

If you're interested in H5P development, please see the H5P specification in the developer documentation and feel free to join the discussions in our new H5P forum.

by Helen Foster.  

Moodle 3.8 is scheduled for release on Monday 11 November 2019, and so once again we’re running a Quality Assurance (QA) testing cycle. The list of over 570 tests includes tests covering new features and improvements in Moodle 3.8.

If you can spare any time and would like to volunteer to help, please see the discussion Help needed with Moodle 3.8 QA testing for details of how you can be involved.

Thanks in advance for your help with our next version of Moodle!

by Helen Foster.  

Our registered Moodle site listings and statistics are shortly being moved to a new location at stats.moodle.org.

Please note that it will not be possible to register or update your site registration during the move, which is expected to be completed within 24 hours from now. Further information on timings will be posted to Moodle Site Status @moodlesites on Twitter.

If you’ve not yet registered your Moodle site, we encourage you to do so after the move is complete. For details, see the documentation Site registration.

The reason for moving registered Moodle site statistics to a new location is so that the moodle.net URL can be used by the new MoodleNet open social media platform for educators.