by Juan Leyva.  

Hello Moodlers!

As we previously announced, we are introducing a new range of Moodle App Plans that will be available in our newly launched Moodle Apps portal on the 2nd of April.

We encourage you to register your site for free on the portal as soon as possible to enjoy the Moodle App to the fullest for free during the month of April (no restrictions applied).

If you are using MoodleCloud or your site is hosted by a Certified Moodle Partner, the Premium plan will be automatically enabled for your site. We still encourage you to register your site on the Moodle Apps portal so you can see Push Notifications statistics and enjoy the many exclusive features we will be adding in the upcoming months.

And finally, please remember that our standard app itself is ALWAYS free: students and teachers who use the Moodle app will never pay any fees. The site owner is the one who subscribes.

REGISTER YOUR SITE ON THE APPS PORTAL

Kind regards, Juan

by Helen Foster.  

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we are sorry that we have insufficient mentors to participate in Google Summer of Code 2020 and so are withdrawing as a mentoring organisation.

Apologies to all students who were considering applying to work with Moodle for GSoC. Thanks for the time and energy you put in to preparing your application.

As always, new developers to the Moodle project are very welcome. Please see the developer documentation and feel free to join our discussions in the General developer forum and Telegram Moodle Dev Chat room.

by Mary Cooch.  

With many teachers and other educators struggling at the moment to switch to online teaching, we've decided to run a special edition of our twice-yearly Learn Moodle Basics MOOC. This is a free, four week course for anyone who wants - or needs! - to teach with Moodle. The course uses the latest version of Moodle, currently Moodle 3.8, and will begin on Monday March 23rd. Sign up is open now.

We hope to create a global, multilingual community atmosphere in the course where new Moodlers and experienced Moodlers can help each other through these interesting times.

If you have friends or colleagues who need quickly to adapt to online teaching, please let them know about our Learn Moodle Basics MOOC. If you are an experienced Moodler, feel free to help Helen Foster and myself get teachers teaching with Moodle.

by Juan Leyva.  

Hi all,

We’re aware that the COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc right now, and schools and organisations are focusing on how to minimise class disruption.

More than ever, our mission to empower educators to improve the world takes on its full meaning. To support educators and learners in this troublesome situation, we're offering our Premium App Plan for free until the 30th of April.

To get your Premium Moodle App for free, you just have to register your site on our upcoming Moodle Apps Portal, which will be ready on March 23.

We’ll get in touch with you soon again to share the link to this new portal, where you’ll also find all the necessary information to register your site.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach us on the moodle.org forum discussion.

The Moodle HQ Team

by Helen Foster.  

Thanks to everyone who participated in the recent Learn Moodle 3.8 Basics MOOC - our 12th run of the course!

Over 4400 people started the course, with 52% receiving a participant badge for posting in a forum and a record 26% (1166 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 3.8 Basics Feedback and Actions.

If you would like to participate in the Learn Moodle 3.9 Basics MOOC, we'll be running the course again in June 2020, with sign-up open soon!

by Sander Bangma.  

Hello all!

Moodle 3.8.2, 3.7.5, 3.6.9 and 3.5.11 have been released. These new minor releases 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.

As part of our focus on improving Moodle's accessibility for the 3.9 release you will also see a number of accessibility improvements that we've back-ported to Moodle 3.7.x and 3.8.x.

The release notes for each version can be found here:

• Moodle 3.8.2 release notes
• Moodle 3.7.5 release notes
• Moodle 3.6.9 release notes
• Moodle 3.5.11 release notes

Please see the releases page for more details.

by Juan Leyva.  

Hello Moodlers!

From 2nd April 2020, we are introducing a new range of Moodle App Plans. 

We are making some changes to our standard Moodle app so it now has three functionality levels called Free, Pro and Premium. Our flagship Branded Moodle App product will not change. 

The resulting set of plans will look like this:

My students are all using the free Moodle app in the app stores, will this affect us?
By default, the free Moodle app will work exactly as it did before, with some new limits:

• Only 2 courses can be saved offline per device
• Only the first 50 devices will receive notifications from any particular Moodle site
• Fewer custom branding options
  

If this is a problem for you, then please read on!

How do the new plans work?
As soon as a Moodle site owner subscribes to a Premium plan or Pro plan, then all devices connecting to that site with our standard Moodle app will immediately receive the additional features, including:

• New expanded notifications with multimedia previews
• More offline courses per device
• More devices receiving notifications per site
• More custom branding options
  

Please note that our standard app itself is ALWAYS free: students and teachers who use the Moodle app will never pay any fees.   The site owner is the one who subscribes.

Are there ways to get a Premium plan for free?
Yes, here are three ways:

1. Using a Moodle Partner, or MoodleCloud
   If your site is hosted with a Moodle Partner, or on MoodleCloud.com, then your Moodle site will automatically receive the full Premium app plan at no cost.
   We do this to thank you for using our official services and supporting the Moodle project.
   
2. Qualify as a non-profit organisation
   Non-profit organisations and NGOs may also qualify to receive the Premium Moodle App Plan at no cost.  Send details about your organisation, including your site URL, to mobile@moodle.com and we will get back to you with instructions soon.
3. Build your own app using our open source code
   As always, we provide our full Premium features as open source code. If you have developers then you can create and control your own app. However, the cost to you is likely to be much more than the very reasonable price of our Premium plan!
   

Why are you making these changes?
It’s important to make very clear: all our software is free and open source, and that will never change. 

We would love to provide all our services for free too, but making software and providing services costs money, lots of money. We estimate that Moodle has cost over US$100 million dollars to develop so far, and we still have big dreams! Our mission and our values prevent us from using advertising, data collection and other techniques that some companies use to provide "free" services.

We’ve designed these plans carefully so that we don’t affect educators who need our support the most, while encouraging the many thousands of larger institutions using Moodle around the world to make a small financial contribution towards our sustainability.

Your support gives us more power to create better and better free Open EdTech for you to use!

OK, so what now?
By 20 March, 2020, we will share with you more information on how and where you can upgrade to these Moodle App Plans.

In the meantime, please read our Frequently Asked Questions on Moodle Docs or join the plans discussion in our community forum.

Thank you for your ongoing support of Moodle!

The whole team at Moodle HQ

by Helen Foster.  

I'm happy to announce that Moodle is taking part in Google Summer of Code 2020 - our 14th year of involvement in the program.

The GSoC program pays students to work on open source software products for 3-4 months (over the northern hemisphere summer), mentored by existing developers.

Please see Projects for new developers for our list of potential GSOC projects and Applying to work with Moodle for GSoC for details of our application process. If you have any questions, you are welcome to post in the discussion GSOC 2020: Questions & answers area for prospective students .

If you're a core Moodle developer and are interested in mentoring a project, please contact David Mudrák.

by Helen Foster.  

I'm happy to announce a new course available on our Learn Moodle site - Moodle Admin Basics.

The MOOC is designed for anyone who wants to learn the very basics of Moodle administration, such as new MoodleCloud site admins. It is self-paced, with H5P content and quizzes to check your understanding, and a badge and a certificate for completing the course.

Please let us know what you think of the course, and if you have any ideas for improvements, by posting in the discussion Feedback wanted about our Moodle Admin Basics MOOC.

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.