Latest Moodle News

by Sandra Matz.  

The early bird deadline for saving on your MoodleMoot Global 2025 tickets is coming up quickly - be sure to secure your tickets by Monday 30th June to save £200.

This year's theme, Learning to Shape Tomorrow, reminds us that the future is something we shape together every day, with every decision we make about how we teach, what we share, and who gets to participate.

MoodleMoot Global has always been more than a conference. It’s a global community of people who care deeply about learning and believe in its power to shape something better for all of us. And we’d love you to join us and be a part of this!

The MoodleMoot Global ticket includes access to the Moodle Party on Wednesday 17 September, access to all the event spaces, sessions, talks, workshops and networking events, as well as lunches and refreshments during the conference, and more!

Don’t miss your chance to book your place by the early bird deadline of 30th June.

We look forward to seeing you in Edinburgh!

by Adrian Greeve.  

Hi Everyone,

I am pleased to announce the successful completion of our Jira migration! This has been a significant undertaking, and I want to extend my sincere gratitude to everyone involved for their hard work and dedication in making this transition a smooth one.

The new Jira system is now live and ready for your exploration. We encourage everyone to log in when convenient and become familiar with the updated platform. You should receive an email invite if you used our old system. 

To assist you with the new system, we've created a FAQ addressing common questions. This document also outlines steps to take if you encounter any issues. If you can’t find an answer to your question then please post in on this discussion thread.

A quick note regarding custom filters and dashboards: Due to the nature of the migration, these personalised configurations may not have transferred automatically. We kindly request that you take the time to recreate or update your custom filters and dashboards within the new system. We understand this may require some small effort on your part, but it will ensure that your personalised views and reporting remain intact and functional.

Please also note that links in moodle.org are currently redirecting to the old system. This should become resolved as the week progresses.

We are confident that this migration will lead to improved efficiency and a more robust project management experience for everyone. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding throughout this process.

Adrian

by Adrian Greeve.  

Hi,

As part of our migration to Jira Cloud, Tracker will be temporarily shut down for two days starting 14 June. During this time, we’ll transfer all Tracker history and existing data to the new system. We expect the new platform to be live by 16 June.

After the migration, the old Tracker system will remain viewable but will no longer accept new entries or updates.

Once our Jira Cloud instance is active, you’ll receive an invitation to log in and explore the new platform. Please follow the instructions provided to activate your account.

Thank you for your support through this transition.

Adrian

by Richard Lefroy.  

The Learning Map plugin for Moodle allows educators to transform course structures into visual, intuitive, and motivating learning paths. In this session presented by Judith Birke from The St. Gallen University of Teacher Education, we will explore how Learning Maps can guide students through activities in a structured yet flexible way - supporting self-paced learning, modular progression, and gamified engagement.

You will see a variety of real-world examples for different teaching and learning scenarios, and leave with practical ideas to make your Moodle courses more learner-centred, visually structured, and motivating to explore.

This webinar is part of the course 'Moodle Academy webinars'. You have to be enrolled in this free course to register and join the webinar.

→ Register at Moodle Academy.

by Adrian Greeve.  

You may remember that we announced the transition of Moodle’s Tracker to JiraCloud last week which will be happening in a couple of weeks time. 

As part of this transition, we will be introducing a limit to how long we keep user accounts active within the Moodle Tracker on Jira Cloud. 

If you regularly use Tracker your account will stay active and this change will have no impact on you. 

However, moving forward, if you don’t interact with our system for three years then your account will be suspended and eventually removed.

You can always sign back up after a long break to gain access to Tracker again, but if your old account has been removed then it is not possible to restore it.

This change will help us better manage our Tracker solution and further support Moodle’s commitment to honouring data privacy regulation, which advocates for institutions to keep their user’s information for the shortest time necessary.

by Richard Lefroy.  

Using Moodle Workplace™ functionality, custom reports allow Moodle LMS admins to configure and share reports using an increasingly wide number of sources. Join Moodle HQ Integration lead and Custom reports expert Paul Holden as he highlights five reports of particular use to LMS and Workplace users and answers queries you might have about configuring custom reports.

This webinar is suitable for administrators and educators interested in reporting options.

This webinar is part of the course 'Moodle Academy webinars'. You have to be enrolled in this free course to register and join the webinar.

→ Register at Moodle Academy.

by Adrian Greeve.  

We are happy to announce that we will be moving our Tracker onto Jira Cloud.

This transition to Jira Cloud will improve your experience with the Moodle Tracker by giving you access to the most recent updates and features that Atlassian (the people who make Jira) have to offer.

We currently host Tracker on a version of Jira, so we are not moving to a different application,  meaning the impact on you should be minimal. 

We are also aiming to keep the existing information currently on Tracker, further minimising the potential for disruption.

Part of the process of migration is moving your tracker details over to the Atlassian servers. If you do not wish to have your user information migrated over then please contact us at privacy@moodle.com

The transition is planned to happen next month and we will keep you informed as we make progress over to the new system. We’ll keep making updates here, so check back regularly to keep up to date with the latest news.

by Sandra Matz.  

Abstract submissions close in just three days!

Now is your chance to be part of shaping the MoodleMoot Global program. Got something interesting to present? We’d love to hear from you.

This year's theme is "Learning to Shape Tomorrow", and we're seeking bold, forward-thinking proposals.

Submit your proposal by 19 May and help shape the future of learning!

Visit the event website for more information.

by Richard Lefroy.  

Are you a new Moodler looking for free support with your Moodle site? Or an experienced Moodler wanting to share your knowledge? Would you like to discuss Moodle in a language other than English? Join Mary Cooch and Helen Foster from Moodle HQ as they take you on a tour of the Moodle.org community forums, explain the best ways to give and get support and give an insight into how the forums are moderated and facilitated.

This webinar is suitable for administrators, educators, developers and anyone with an interest in using Moodle.

This webinar is part of the course 'Get involved in the Moodle.org Community forums'. You have to be enrolled in the course to join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Thom Rawson.  

The Japanese version of this announcement is shown below the English version.

この発表の日本語版は英語版の下に掲載されている。

Moodle Academy is excited to announce its first webinar held in Japanese!

Dr. Yasuyuki NAKAMURA from Nagoya University, will give a Webinar in Japanese. The date is Tuesday, May 13, 2025 at 05:00 UTC (14:00 JST).

Title: The Latest Trends in STACK, an Automated Formula Scoring System, Based on the Participation in the STACK Conference 2025

All are welcome to attend this historic event! Please register now!

Moodle Academyは、初の日本語によるウェビナーを開催します！

名古屋大学の中村泰之博士が日本語でウェビナーを行います。日時は来週火曜日、2025年5月13日05:00 UTC (14:00 JST)です。

Title: 数式自動採点システムSTACKの最新動向、ーSTACK Conference 2025の参加をふまえてー

この歴史的なイベントには誰でも参加できる！今すぐお申し込みください！

by Adrian Greeve.  

Hi everyone,

We are looking to improve the performance of Tracker. We have been slowly accruing more user accounts over the years and the large number of users is having a detrimental impact on the system.

As part of ongoing care of our tracker system we will be removing Tracker accounts that have had no interaction with the system. This only applies to accounts that are older than four years old.

If you have used Tracker at all, you will not be impacted. This is only a clean up of accounts for people that have created an account, but not used it.

You can at any stage create a new account with the same details if it has been removed due to this clean up. If you require further assistance with your Tracker account, please contact us.

Thank you for your continued support helping make Moodle better for everyone.

by Sandra Matz.  

We are excited to announce that MoodleMoot Global 2025 is officially open for registrations! This year’s event will take us to Edinburgh, UK on the 16-18 September.

This global event is your space to exchange ideas, explore new approaches, and connect with a global network of people to build a better future for all.

Secure your super-early bird ticket today! Only 100 tickets are available at this special price, so don’t miss the opportunity to lock in your place and confirm your attendance.

This year's theme, learning to shape tomorrow, recognises that education is one of the most powerful tools we have in shaping the future. This event is your space to exchange ideas, explore new approaches, and connect with a global network of people who want to build a better future for all.

We’re inviting educators, learning designers, technologists, researchers, workplace learning leaders, and change agents from around the world to share ideas that challenge the status quo and help shape the future of learning. Whether you’re in higher education, corporate training, or anywhere in between, your insights matter.

Submit your abstract proposal now for the opportunity to be part of the program! The abstract deadline is 19 May.

We look forward to welcoming you to Edinburgh in September!

Best regards,
MoodleMoot Global team

by Matt Porritt.  

Hi Everyone,

We’re excited to announce the release of Moodle LMS 5.0! A big thank you to our amazing community, the Moodle LMS teams, and all those who played a part in bringing this release to life; we truly appreciate your shared effort and dedication.

This latest release brings new features and enhancements that make it easier to manage courses, assess learners, and configure AI tools, all while giving administrators more control and flexibility.

Here’s an overview of what’s new in LMS 5.0:

🧭 A clearer view of course activities

A new Activities page gives educators and learners one place to see all course activities, deadlines, submissions, and grading progress.
→ Saves time, reduces clicks, and helps everyone stay organised and on track.

🧠 AI tools you can configure and track

Admins can now:

• Track how AI tools are used across the site with a new AI usage report
• View who’s accepted the AI policy
• Manage multiple AI providers with custom settings for each model
  → Greater transparency and control - plus better support for cost management and compliance.

New for learners: Explain joins Summarise as an AI-powered tool to help unpack course content and improve understanding, all within the LMS.

✅ Assessment updates that save time

• Shared question banks across courses for easier reuse and collaboration
• New question bank filters to quickly find questions by type, status, date, and more
• Site-wide late submission penalty rules, applied automatically
• Faster performance with pre-created quiz attempts and background regrading
  → Create and manage assessments more efficiently, with less manual work and smoother workflows

📊 Faster, smarter reporting

Admins can now duplicate custom reports, keeping all filters, fields, and schedules intact - making report creation more efficient than ever.
New filtering options also improve the accuracy and clarity of course tracking.

♿ Accessibility improvements across the platform

Moodle 5.0 introduces long image descriptions, richer glossary and navigation filtering, and an updated accessibility checker in TinyMCE. These updates help educators build more inclusive learning environments, with less manual work.

→ We’re committed to continuous accessibility improvements in every release - supporting educators in meeting standards and reaching all learners.

Other enhancements include manual grading for BigBlueButton sessions, new media playback options, transparent drag-and-drop question elements, and more control over enrolment messaging.

Moodle LMS 5.0 includes many more updates across grading, media, enrolment, and reporting - each designed to save time and improve the teaching and learning experience. You can explore an overview of the new features or dive into technical details in the developer documentation. As you begin to plan for site upgrades, be sure to review the important changes introduced in this release first.

Thank you to everyone across the Moodle community who contributed to making LMS 5.0 possible, your collaboration and dedication continue to shape the future of open-source learning.

Warm regards,
Matt Porritt
Product Director, Platform Solutions

by Simey Lameze.  

We want to say a big thank you to all our QA testers for helping us complete 412 tests during this cycle! Your dedication made the 100% pass rate achievement possible. 🧡

All testers will be awarded a badge, so please ensure you have a valid moodle.org account and that your details are correct to receive it. 🏅

During this cycle, we identified some deprecated capability errors that appear during the upgrade process. The underlying issue, tracked in MDL-77237, requires further work and has been deferred to be fixed after the Moodle 5.0 release. These messages, while unexpected, should not prevent the upgrade process from completing successfully.

A big thanks to our core developers for their swift action in fixing the bugs we encountered during testing. Your hard work ensures we're ready for the release of Moodle 5.0!

Lastly, thank you to everyone who contributed in any way—whether through testing, investigating, or fixing bugs. Your efforts have been crucial in maintaining the quality and reliability of Moodle for educators and learners worldwide. 🚀🏆

by Richard Lefroy.  

During this webinar you will learn about the new features in Moodle 5.0 for administrators and teachers.

The webinar will be presented by Mary Cooch and Helen Foster from Moodle HQ. 

Note: this webinar is part of the course 'What's New in Moodle 5.0'. You have to be enrolled in the course to register and join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Marie Achour.  

To all, 

As we are rapidly approaching the release of Moodle LMS 5.0 we wanted to ensure that you, our community, are informed about major changes, outside of new functionality, that may impact the work you need to do prior to upgrading your Moodle implementations.  

As you will be aware with the change to the version numbering that was announced approximately 12 months ago, the start of each new series (the X.0 version) will be when final deprecations will be occurring, and when we will be making other big underlying changes to Moodle.  The rationale and benefits for this change are detailed in the linked announcement, so please take the time to review it.

All of the changes listed here have previously been announced. We are collecting them into one communication summary ahead of the release to help increase awareness and aid you in planning your upgrades.

Plugins 

A number of plugins have been removed in Moodle LMS 5.0.  These plugins will be available either in the Moodle HQ github for those who wish to continue to use them or, if they are adopted by a maintainer, in the plugins directory.  Specific details can be found in the listed tracker issues. Please note that if these plugins are not reinstalled before completing the upgrade process, the data tables will be removed as part of the upgrade process.  These plugins are:

• MDL-82457 - Chat (mod_chat) 

• MDL-82457 - Survey (mod_survey)

• MDL-78778 - CAS Authentication (auth_cas)

• MDL-77005 - Atto editor and its sub-plugins (editor_atto) 

• MDL-84652- MNET plugins (auth_mnet, block_mnet_hosts, enrol_mnet, mnetservice_enrol, portfolio_mahara)

Oracle Database support  (MDL-80166)

Oracle Database support has been removed from Moodle LMS 5.0, and community members who are currently using Oracle will need to migrate their database to a supported system before upgrading.  This decision was made due to the lack of ongoing support for Oracle in PHP and the very low usage of the platform within the Moodle community, Oracle has not been a recommended platform since prior to Moodle LMS 3.0.

Course formats (MDL-83527)

With the work being done to modernise the Moodle course look and feel, support for some legacy course formats libraries will be deprecated in Moodle LMS 5.0.  All course formats that still depend on libraries from Moodle LMS 3.11 and prior will be deprecated. This is primarily to remove the use of YUI from Moodle but also to allow the code to be cleaned up and made more maintainable for the future. From Moodle LMS 6.0, the deprecated libraries will be completely removed.  Details on migrating a course format from the 3.11 libraries can be found in the dev docs.

Bootstrap 5 (MDL-71979)

Moodle LMS 5.0 will be the first version of Moodle to use Bootstrap 5.  This is a big change, but a lot of work has been put into making this as seamless as possible.  The team has invested in creating a compatibility layer between Bootstrap 4 and Bootstrap 5 to ease the transition, however, the complexity of this change will mean for many with custom themes and other customisations that it is recommended that these are checked prior to upgrading.  The dev docs provide guidance on the major changes between Bootstrap 4 and 5 and how to migrate between them.

Quiz and Question Bank (MDL-68806 and MDL-71378) 

There has been considerable work in improving the functionality of Quiz question banks to simplify the management and sharing of questions within Moodle.  This is a major change in functionality, and as a result, if question bank sharing is commonly used at a Category or System level, please ensure that you fully understand the impact to your processes before upgrading.  Documentation is currently in the process of being created and will be available close to the time of release.

Additionally, a new option has been created that allows institutions to pre-create quiz attempts before the student commences the quiz.  This has been designed to help mitigate database loads when Moodle is used for large-scale synchronous exams.  Use of this is optional and needs to be enabled in the administration settings; however, if it is enabled, this will affect events appearing in the logs and potentially other reporting that utilises data from the quiz attempt tables.

MimeTex removal

MimeTex is being removed as an option for TeX filters.  The underlying 3rd party library that is used was added as a fall back option if other TeX filter options were not available, the library has not been maintained for an extremely long time and as a result is becoming a security and stability concern.  If your installation uses TeX filters please ensure that an alternative such as MathJax, LaTeX, or another is installed to ensure the proper functionality is maintained.

Final deprecation policy update

Finally a reminder that there will been a small update to the deprecation policy in the coming weeks clarifying the retention of the method signature.  This will be important to be aware of moving forward.  As always please check the release notes when they are available to see a full list of final deprecations in this release.

Thank you in advance for your continued support and happy Moodling!

The Moodle Products Team

by Richard Lefroy.  

The STACK question type is the most powerful and flexible maths related question available for any platform. With that power comes some complexity and this webinar will address how it can be used by non experts. We will be showing ways of simplifying the question editing process and sharing resources.

Maths expertise will not be required (or demonstrated) for this webinar.

The webinar will be presented by Marcus Green, Senior eLearning Technical Consultant at Catalyst IT Europe, and is suitable for both educators and administrators.

Note: this webinar is part of the course 'Moodle Academy webinars'. You have to be enrolled in the course to register and join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Sandra Matz.  

Have you ever wanted to try something on Moodle with the latest version, but did not know how to set up a Moodle site? Or maybe you have seen an upcoming feature being developed on Tracker, and wished you could test it before it’s released? In this webinar, we will show you a simple way to create a Moodle test site - no technical setup needed. You will learn how to:

• Quickly create a test site to explore new Moodle changes.

• Try new features that are being developed.

• Test Moodle plugins.

• Utilise your site for Moodle Q&A testing.

Whether you’re a teacher, administrator, or just curious about what’s coming next in Moodle, this session will show you how to easily test new features and stay up to date with Moodle’s latest developments.

This webinar will be presented by Sara Arjona, Analyst Developer/Integrator, and Júlia Verdaguer, Content Designer, at Moodle HQ.

This webinar is part of the course 'Moodle Testing for Non-Technical Users'. You have to be enrolled in this free course to register and join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.