by Marie Achour.  

Hello Community Members, 

Happy new year and welcome to our 4th edition of Showcase Shorts. 

Despite the holiday period in play in most of our MoodleHQ team locations, we have made great progress during the last few weeks in delivering our product strategy. 

Our plans for 2023 and beyond will see the development of Moodle's product portfolio focus on 'Improving our User Experience and Flow' and 'Evolving our Technology'. 

Improving our user experience and flow​ 

This sprint, we progressed a number of key initiatives under this umbrella which will come to fruition as part of the Moodle LMS 4.2 Release, scheduled for late April 2023. 

You can find out more about expected changes to Course Hierarchy, including indentation and activity formatting, which have been informed by a thorough discovery process and supported by key members of the community by watching this ‘Showcase Short’.

Course Hierarchy Improvements 

We are also continuing our work on improving the Gradebook look and feel, with progress made during our last sprint demonstrated in this video. 

Gradebook 4.2 Deliverables

Finally, we have further progressed work on Bulk Editing for courses and activities, a project proudly supported by the Moodle Users Association, which you can see in this short edit. 

Bulk Editing 4.2 Deliverables

Evolving our technology 

This sprint, we continued our focus on integrations with progress made towards enhancing our messaging experience through the introduction of an integration with Matrix and further improvements to our integration with TinyMCE. You can find out more about progress on these pieces of work by watching this video.

Matrix & TinyMCE Integrations 

Recently completed research, conducted with our users and Moodle Partners, will inform the prioritisation of our integration efforts moving forward. To see a summary of the research findings, please watch this ‘Showcase Short’ presented by Carles Aguiló, our Technical Partnerships Manager.

Integrations User Research 

Work also continues on our MoodleNet, Mobile Applications and MoodleCloud offerings which we will share with you in our next ‘Showcase Shorts’ editions. 

More broadly, our strategy at Moodle will always include a continued focus on engagement with you, our Community! 

In this short video, you can see the latest developments with enhancements to our Moodle Academy and Moodle.org sites.

Moodle Academy & moodle.org Site Updates 

And finally, before we leave you, we would like to congratulate the Moodle Workplace team on their most recent release, which you can find out more about in this note. 

Until next sprint! 

The Moodle Products Team

by Aurélie Soulier.  

Hello Moodlers!

Moodle is in the air! As announced on the 2nd January 2023, the 'Share your Moodle love 🧡🎓' competition deadline is fast approaching.

We’d like you to show us a Moodle course design that you love. You have until Monday 30 January 2023 at 23:59 UTC to share a great course, and we have a prize for the winner and runner-up to be given on 14th February 2023.
The winner and runner-up will also get a badge each.

This could be a course you are participating in, or one you have designed yourself, that works well for your participants and topic(s).
We can’t wait to see great examples of well-designed courses (not just good-looking courses).

Head to the Competition Centre to read the rules and submit your Moodle course design, now (you need to enrol in the competition centre and remain enrolled for us to see your entry)!

Best wishes and good luck!
Aurélie and the Community Sites team

by Sandra Matz.  

Hello Community Members,

We are delighted to announce that MoodleMoot Global 2023 will take place on 18-21 September 2023 at the Hotel Barceló Sants in Barcelona, Spain.

The pre-conference DevJam and the Moodle Global Partners day will be held on Monday 18 September and MoodleMoot Global will run from 19-21 September.

More info coming soon! In the meantime, you can register your interest in attending.

Best wishes,
Sandra & MoodleMoot Global team
#MootGlobal23

by Sandra Matz.  

In a partnership founded in a shared commitment to open, inclusive education, the Moodle Learning Design team in the US worked with UNESCO’s Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL) to build a Digital Competencies for Literacy Educators course that is being distributed to Literacy Educators around the world. In this session, speakers will demonstrate how they worked together to build this course to bridge the digital divide by using core Moodle tools such as Lesson and Database, as well as a mobile-first design philosophy.

Join us at this webinar on Friday 27 January at 14:00 UTC to learn more about the practical strategies used to design this Moodle course for low or no bandwidth environments.

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

Register for the webinar at Moodle Academy.

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Community Members,

The Moodle HQ Product team is proud to announce the launch of our new public roadmap! 

Although we’ve always had our individual team plans, the Product Leadership team recently took on the challenge of making these plans more easily accessible to our Community Members and Contributors. 

Our key strategic initiatives for 2023 and beyond will see us focus on two key areas.

1. Improving our user experience and flow​ 

The entire user experience from onboarding to daily teaching and learning is being reviewed. We will be addressing the hundreds of issues community members raise with us on the ease of using Moodle day to day whilst rethinking how some of our most popular activities operate to make them more intuitive. 

2. Evolving our technology 

To ensure that Moodle can deliver cutting-edge products and services for the next decade and beyond, we are investing in optimising Moodle's underlying architecture. Expect more modernised solutions, easier integrations and a cleaner, leaner platform that can continue to perform at scale across a distributed internet landscape. 

You can see the activities we currently have mapped out to drive these initiatives by perusing our detailed roadmap; simply log in to Tracker and access this board. 

You can review this document to find out how the roadmap gets created and how you can contribute to its creation. 

We hope you find this information helpful and look forward to your feedback on it. 

Thank you, 

The Moodle Products Leadership Team

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Community Members,

Here at Moodle HQ, we strive to continuously improve our ways of working in order to make Moodle LMS, and our other product solutions, the best they can be for our users. 

In response to feedback from our Moodle Partners and many of our larger customers, today, we formally announce some minor changes to the Moodle LMS release cadence. 

These changes are being made to: 

• Provide a large portion of our user base more time to prepare for upgrades to their solutions which are often managed during the summer break period in both the southern and northern hemispheres. 
• Create a buffer allowing updates to our Mobile Application and Moodle Workplace solutions, which are updated within weeks of our latest Moodle LMS release, to be completed before the summer break period, meaning that all key Moodle solutions will be available for our users in time for their upgrades. 

Our revised release schedule will be as follows for the calendar years 2023 and 2024: 

Please note that, as always, these are the target dates for releases. The dates may vary slightly due to unforeseen circumstances. 

To find out more about our release process, please visit the dedicated Developer documentation available here. 

We hope that you will find this information useful and look forward to your feedback. 

Regards, 

The Moodle Products Team

by Adrian Greeve.  

Hi everyone,

We've just released Moodle 4.1.1, 4.0.6, 3.11.12, and 3.9.19 today.

The new releases can be found via our download channels (https://download.moodle.org or Git).
As always, we recommend you upgrade your Moodle sites where possible, to benefit from the bug-fixes and security improvements.

You can find the release notes on the following pages:

•  Moodle 4.1.1 release notes
•  Moodle 4.0.6 release notes
•  Moodle 3.11.12 release notes
•  Moodle 3.9.19 release notes

Please see the releases page for more details.

Version Release status Initial release General support ends Security support ends 3.9 (LTS) Current security 15 June 2020 10 May 2021 13 November 2023 (ext 6M) 
3.11 Current security 17 May 2021 14 Nov 2022 (ext 6M) 13 Nov 2023 (ext 12M) 4.0 Current stable 19 April 2022 8 May 2023 13 November 2023 4.1 (LTS) Current stable 28 November 2022 13 November 2023 10 November 2025 4.2 Future stable 24 April 2023 22 April 2024 21 October 2024

by Sandra Matz.  

Please join us for the Moodle Academy webinar "Co-Create courses with ABC Learning Design" on Wednesday 18 January, 09:00-10:00 UTC.

During this webinar attendees will learn how to use the ABC Learning Design method to co-create Moodle Academy courses.

You can find out more about the course and register for the webinar at Moodle Academy.

by Aurélie Soulier.  

Hello and Happy New Year!

We would like to start 2023 with a bit of fun. This is why we’ve created a little competition where you can share your Moodle love.
We’d like you to show us a Moodle course design that you love. You have four weeks (deadline: Monday 30 January 2023 at 23:59 UTC) to share a great course, and we have a prize for the winner and runner-up to be given on 14th February 2023.

This could be a course you are participating in, or one you have designed yourself, that works well for your participants and topic(s).
We can’t wait to see great examples of well-designed courses (not just good-looking courses).

Head to the Competition Centre to read the rules and submit your Moodle course design, now!

Best wishes and good luck!
Aurélie and the Community Sites team

by Aurélie Soulier.  

Hello community members,

We are trying to improve the Community Sites. One of the sections that we feel has room for improvement is the plugins directory, so we are doing some specific work on it in 2023.

In order to understand the needs of course and site administrators, as we make these improvements, we would like to invite you to a virtual chat about the plugin.

Go to the most relevant forum post for you to find out more details and to sign up to a workshop:

• Español: Taller con Moodle HQ sobre el repositorio de plugins el próximo 9 de enero de 2023

• English: We need your views: plugins directory workshop on 09 Jan 2023

• Français: Demande d'aide: la base des plugins, le 09 janvier 2023

Best wishes from us to you for the festive season and the New Year!
Aurelie and the Community Sites team

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Community Members,

Welcome to our third edition of Showcase Shorts and the last one for 2022.

We thought we’d share a bit more of our showcase this time so you can see the full updates from our teams, bloopers and all. This also allows us to introduce our product teams at Moodle HQ.

First up, we have the Moodle Platform Team - led by Matt Porritt, this team of 12 is dedicated to building and maintaining our core Moodle LMS platform and focuses on addressing the needs of Moodle system administrators and Moodle developers. 

Take a look to see what they achieved during our latest sprint.

[video]

We move on to an update from our Product Experience Team - led by Zoe Rippon, this small but mighty team of 4 has the broad remit of defining the Moodle product experience overall, setting Moodle’s product style and tone of voice as well as defining our user research and design practices. 

Find out more about what they do through this short update.

[video]

Next up is the Educational Solutions Team - it's our biggest team in Moodle HQ Products with 23 people and is made up of three smaller teams who all look after different aspects of Moodle LMS and focus on the needs of educators and their students; including our MoodleCloud offering. Our new Head of Educational Solutions, Brett Dalton, will be joining us on the 16th of January. Whilst eagerly awaiting his arrival, the team have continued to produce outstanding outcomes. 

Check out the huge amount of progress the teams made throughout the sprint.

[video]

Then we have an update from our Moodle Community Team - made up of two smaller teams, one dedicated to Moodle Academy and the other to Community Engagement, this team which is led by Jessica Gramp is focused on fostering contribution from and catering to the needs of our community members. 

You can watch updates from both teams in this update.

[video]

Our smallest pure product team, the MoodleNet Team, is made up of only 4 people, but it still packs a punch. Led by Paul Hodgson who was on holiday for this showcase, this team is dedicated to creating a platform where people can find, share and curate open educational resources. 

Our lead developer, Alessandro takes you through the outcomes achieved by the team in this short update.

[video]

Up next, a short but sweet update from our Mobile Applications Team, led by Juan Leyva, this group of 14 people manage all of our BMAs and ensures that our mobile applications are always up to date with the latest features from our most recent releases. 

In this showcase, they share a new feature being created just for our mobile users, biometric login. 

[video]

And finally, an update from Emilio Lozano who leads our Workplace Solutions Team, this group of 11 superstars is dedicated to creating LMS solutions suited for workplace settings, focused on the needs of trainers and HR L&D reps. 

See the deliverables they achieved during the sprint with this update.

[video]

We hope you enjoy these insights and the introduction to our teams. Wishing you all a wonderful end of year and a fabulous start to 2023.

Until next sprint (and year)!

The Moodle Products Team

by Sandra Matz.  

Please join us for the Moodle Academy "What’s New in Moodle 4.1" webinar on Thursday 15 December 2022, 12:00-13:00 UTC.

In this webinar you will learn about the new features and improvements for all users in Moodle LMS 4.1.

The webinar is suitable for anyone who is already familiar with Moodle.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Marie Achour.  

Hi everyone,

I am very proud to announce the latest release of Moodle LMS 4.1!

Our latest release builds on the user experience enhancements and features of Moodle LMS 4.0, giving more possibilities to build better learning experiences and for learners to find what they want when they need it. As a Long Term Support release, Moodle LMS 4.1 also ensures security support for three years - 18 months more than the standard edition.

Community collaboration

As always, our work would not be possible without the support of all of you. 

Our community contributed 9 new features and 72 improvements to this release. 115 bug fixes that were integrated during the development cycle also came from the community and were applied to 3.9, 3.11, and 4.0 as well.

In addition, you have helped us by running QA tests, providing translations and writing documentation. 

Thank you for your efforts in supporting and improving Moodle, as an open source project, we couldn’t do this without you!

A smoother experience with UX enhancements

In the latest release of Moodle LMS 4.1 UX improvements have been made to Database activity, including a useful start page, an improved Image gallery preset, plus three new presets: Journal, Proposals and Resources, which can be previewed. These four ready-made presets mean that you can use and adapt one of the four on offer to fit your needs, without having to build a layout from nothing. The presets can also be previewed before use so that you can be sure it is the layout you are looking for. These UX improvements have been supported by the Moodle Users Association. 

Caption: Moodle LMS 4.1 comes with four presets to use as a starting point.

UX improvements have also been made to the Gradebook to make it easier to navigate. With Moodle LMS 4.1, a new ‘Grades summary’ page has been added to provide a summary of the grade averages for each course activity and can be filtered by activity. There is an improved ‘User report’ with a more modern design and collapsible categories, and a ‘Single view report’ with improved design and the ability to simply search by user, group or grade item, and more easily do bulk actions. This allows teachers and trainers to more easily analyse the success of formative and summative assessments and inform improvements to course design.

Caption: The new ‘Grades summary’ page provides a summary of the grade averages for each course activity.

Maximising the use of BigBlueButton

Moodle LMS 4.1 also includes improvements to BigBlueButton, the open source virtual classroom integrated into Moodle as a standard feature, including the ability to invite external guests to a BigBlueButton video conferencing session. 

Improving the text editor

In Moodle LMS 4.1, TinyMCE 6 is included as an additional text editor, alongside the standard Atto editor. TinyMCE 6 is a modern and intuitive text editor that is accessible and offers an improved user experience. 

Caption: TinyMCE 6 is included as an additional editor alongside the standard Atto editor.

Manage and collaborate with ease using the Moodle Question bank 

Moodle LMS 4.1 features improvements to the Question bank features, making it easier for teachers and course creators to manage and collaborate on quiz questions. These improvements include inline editing of the question title, a new “Modified by” column to see who modified a question, and a new “Last used” column to see when a question was last attempted by a student.   

More control over custom report settings

Custom reports now include a number of new useful report sources, including Badges, Comments, Notes, Course participants, Blogs, and Files. There is a new custom report settings page, allowing the admin to limit the number of reports and disable live editing.

Other key improvements

More helpful additions in the Moodle LMS 4.1 release include:

• Profiles can now display the user’s timezone.
• The grading scale can now have additional letters, going beyond the previous limit of fourteen.
• Completion reports include custom profile fields and the time of completion. 
• A new admin setting to control the availability of the “Contact site support” form.

Find out more about Moodle LMS 4.1 and watch our short videos on Database activity, the Gradebook and Customer reports.

Database activity

Gradebook

Custom reports

Enjoy!

Marie

by Simey Lameze.  

Hi all

Thanks to all of our Quality Assurance (QA) testers, who helped us with testing 615 test and fully completing our QA cycle! 👏 👏

That was an amazing team effort so a big thank you to everyone that has helped in any way with the success of another QA cycle! 💪

Those who completed 3 or more tests will receive a Moodle tester badge 🏅 in recognition of their efforts. 

Also a special thanks 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 4.1 to be released on Monday 28th of November of 2022.

Simey

by Sandra Matz.  

Please join us for the Moodle Academy "MoodleNet for Developers" webinar on Wednesday 30 November 2022, 11:00-12:00 UTC.

In this webinar you will learn how to develop MoodleNet packages and contribute to the MoodleNet community.

The webinar is suitable for any developers interested in learning how to develop MoodleNet packages and it’s expected that attendees will already know Javascript, React, NodeJs and Typescript is warmly recommended. It is also good to have experience in Arango DB.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Community Members, 

Welcome to our second edition of Showcase Shorts. 

We held our first Maintenance & Planning Sprint at the end of October. Maintenance & Planning Sprints are dedicated to making time to do some of the tasks one never quite finds time to do during feature development sprints but that are essential to maintaining a clean code base! 

We are also currently in code freeze for Moodle LMS 4.1 and actively working through our QA cycle. We are always keen for help with this process so if you’d like to get involved, please do! 

For these reasons, we don’t have a lot of new development to share with you in this edition of Showcase Shorts but there is still a ton of work going on, particularly on integrations.

[video] 

We also used this time to prepare for the start of our next development cycle (12 weeks) by engaging with stakeholders, reviewing our backlogs and confirming our priorities for the increment ahead. For a sneak peak into this process, take a look at:

1) How we engage with our Partners to prioritise our development of Moodle Workplace. 

[video] 

2) Some of the scoping and design activities we completed in preparation for Moodle LMS 4.2.

[video]

3) An overview of the planning sessions we held to prepare for our next phase of development on MoodleCloud.

[video] 

We also used the sprint to progress some of our research initiatives. 

Our LMS Messaging research findings have been shared on the UX Community Forum. If you didn’t see the post, please check it out now. 

And we started processing the results from our annual MoodleCloud Market Research activity, with some interesting findings coming through about the type of users who use our product.

[video]

We also made great progress towards the release of the Developer Edition of MoodleNet later this year.

[video] 

But the big news for this sprint was that we were getting ready to launch our new look moodle.org which we really hope you are enjoying. We thought you might like taking a little look at the final steps we took to get to this point.

[video]

We hope you enjoyed this quick update. 

Until next sprint! 

The Moodle Products Team

by Sandra Matz.  

Please join us for the Moodle Academy "Creating Quality Quiz Questions" webinar on Thursday 17 November 2022, 12:00-13:00 UTC.

During this webinar you will gain an understanding of the challenges and potential issues when creating quiz questions. You will also explore how to make the most of Moodle's many question types for both summative and formative assessment.

This webinar is suitable for anyone interested in creating quiz questions with a pedagogically sound basis.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Community Members,

The Moodle Products Team is delighted to welcome you to our very first Showcase Shorts!!

We’ve received feedback telling us you’d like more insight into the work we do at Moodle HQ and our progress on the development of the Moodle platforms managed by our teams.

Our Products team at Moodle work in 3-week sprints, and at the end of every sprint cycle, we hold a Showcase during which our teams share what they have achieved during the sprint period.

To make it easier for you to stay connected to our work at Moodle HQ, we want to share the highlights of our Sprint Showcase with you from this point forward!

This sprint was not a normal 3-week sprint as it included a pause for many of our team members who attended MoodleMoot Global 2022 in Barcelona at the end of September.

Despite this, we achieved a lot, including:

• Finalising the release of Workplace 4.0
• Launching our new Moodle Content Style Guide (if you have seen it, please make sure to check it out!) 
• Welcoming our new Moodle Community Engagement Lead

We also progressed product design and development for the Moodle LMS 4.1 and 4.2 releases.

You can see all the details, as well as updates from our MoodleCloud & Mobile Apps teams, by watching these ‘Showcase Shorts’:

• Get an update on our progress with MDL-75071 which will see us deprecate Atto in favour of Tiny 6. [video]
• See a demonstration of changes being made to our Grade User Report and Grade Single View Report as part of our efforts to improve the user experience in Gradebook as part of MDL-74953. [video]
• Find out about the latest updates to our Database activity as part of MDL-75059, a project proudly supported by the MUA. [video]
• See some of the changes we’ve implemented to get better data about our MoodleCloud customers to improve our product positioning. [video]
• Watch a summary of all the things that are being delivered for Moodle App Workplace 4.0 and a new feature coming on all our Moodle Apps. [video]
• Get an insiders view of the progress of our integrations. [video]

And last but certainly not least, you can get an overview of some of the big things the Moodle Community team have been working on, including data insights from MoodleMoot Global and a sneak peek at the mobile version of our redesigned moodle.org due for launch very very soon! [video]

We truly hope you enjoy this update, and, as always, we’d love your feedback; so please add comments to the MDL issues in the tracker or post your thoughts in our forums.

Until next sprint!
The Moodle Products Team

by Aurélie Soulier.  

On Monday 31st October, we’re planning to launch our new moodle.org site, which is a first step in improving the look and feel of the site. 

The site will be on maintenance mode after 13:30 (UTC) for the duration of the update.

by Simey Lameze.  

Hi everyone,

We're running another Quality Assurance (QA) testing cycle to test the next version of Moodle - 4.1.

If you'd like to try out Moodle 4.1 on our QA testing site and at the same time help with QA testing, see the QA testing guide for details of how you can get involved.

If you're unsure of anything, or have any questions, please post in this forum or join our new Moodle QA Telegram chat room or Moodle QA chat room on Matrix.

As always, we're aiming for a 100% pass rate of QA tests, so all help is much appreciated.