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By Eric Clayton

The high point of our tour through Morocco was always meant to be the camel ride in the desert. The trip was designed that way; it was a big, country-wide loop. We began in the Moroccan port city of Tangier, having arrived from Spain by way of the Strait of Gibraltar. Our tour set out […]

Click through to read the full article At the Edge of the Desert, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

Helping Families Recover from Addiction: Coping, Growing, and Healing through 12-Step Practices and Ignatian Spirituality retells Jean Heaton’s journey “working the steps” as a family member of people with addictions.

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to register for our next Moodle Academy free webinar “Upgrading a Large Moodle Site”, on Wednesday 21st February at 8:00-9:00 UTC. At this webinar, we will welcome Cameron Ball, Senior Architect at Catalyst IT, a Moodle Premium Certified Partner. Catalyst IT is a multi-region software development company that provides enterprise-level services for open source software.

Upgrading Moodle is a challenge at the best of times. With so many interesting plugins out there (not to mention core itself); any upgrade is sure to have some degree of challenge.

In this presentation Cameron will cover Catalyst’s approach for upgrading a huge Moodle installation from 3.9 to 4.1 covering:

• History of this large site;

• Overall approach for the upgrade;

• Codebase audit strategy and techniques;

• Database audit strategy and techniques;

• Data and configuration migration strategy and techniques

Join us for this highly entertaining session, voted number 1 favourite at MoodleMoot Global 2023, as Cameron takes you on their roller coaster ride of a journey to upgrade the largest Moodle in the Southern Hemisphere.

This webinar is part of the course ‘Moodle Academy webinars’. You have to be enrolled in the course to join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

The practice of repetition is an important tool used throughout the Spiritual Exercises. Looking back on their shared time in Chicago, Collin and Michael reflect on how we all might learn to better savor the graces in our own lives.

The post The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Every Chicago Deep Dish Pizza appeared first on The Jesuit Post.

by Marie Achour.  

Hi Moodlers,

The Moodle Products team recently completed our 3-monthly increment planning process during which we re-assessed our priorities and formalised our delivery plans for the quarter ahead, as well as reviewed our longer-term roadmap.

Our goals for the quarter are aligned with Moodle's Product Vision which is focused on empowering our users to unlock their creativity, facilitate collaboration and optimise their learning & business outcomes.

For Moodle LMS, this means that we will be aiming to:

1. Complete the designs for our new AI Subsystem which will power Moodle’s AI capabilities in the future, with immediate focus on enabling AI-generated content creation and launching embedded tools to support learners.

2. Build our new SMS Subsystem which will enable the enriching of the notifications functionality in Moodle, helping educators and their learners collaborate more effectively and stay informed of key events that impact their learning outcomes.

3. Finalise the changes to our activity icons, with a new colour palette and some new designs that will make it easier for students to easily identify what they are working on.

4. Deliver our new course subsection functionality, providing more flexibility on how courses can be structured in Moodle to make them easier to navigate and provide more options for how content can be presented.

5. Complete the integration of the ‘Ordering Question Type’ plugin into Moodle core, as it is one of our most popular plugins it’s no surprise that this project was chosen by the Moodle User Association.

6. And last but certainly not least, support the release of Moodle LMS 4.4 scheduled for the 22nd of April. 

For Moodle Workplace, this means we will be focused on:

1. Delivering our new Course Catalogue feature, bringing self-directed learning capability to our solution for the first time!

2. Passing our WACG AA accessibility accreditation, certifying Moodle Workplace as best in class against accessibility standards (also for the first time).

Our community developers should also expect to see further developments in support of our ongoing commitment to modernise our software:

1. Updates to the Task API: we will be completing technical enhancements that will make it easier for administrators to manage their sites in the case of task failures and create the foundation for further technical modernisation in the future.

2. Enhancements to the LTI framework: creating more opportunities to leverage the power of this common standard in Moodle.

3. Changes to our Web services & Bootstrap: please watch the videos below for excellent summaries of the work we will be progressing in this space.

4. Focus on Plugin reviews: each of our teams will dedicate time this quarter to review plugins submitted by our community, keep an eye out for feedback and a sharp drop in the queue!

Webservices

Bootstrap

To find out more about these upcoming improvements and to see what we have planned long term, please check out our Public Roadmap. From there, you can follow the links to the Tracker issues for even more details.

Until next increment!

The Moodle Products Team

By Gretchen Crowder

Sometimes it’s easier to invite God into the bad moments than the good ones. I’ve noticed I tend to my friendship with God more intently—this friendship I may have neglected for a time—when stuff has completely fallen apart. Two weeks into January every year, my family celebrates most of our milestones. My boys’ birthdays are […]

Click through to read the full article When Valentine’s Day Meets Ash Wednesday, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

In Lord, You Called Me: Discerning Your Path in Life, Brother Ricardo Grzona, FRP, offers 21 lectio divina encounters with God’s Word.

By dotMagis Editor

Lent is a time for entering more deeply into the profound mysteries of Christ’s life. One of the ways we do this is through direct and daily contact with the Gospels. Join Andrea Tornielli and Sr. Bernadette Reis, FSP, for a prayerful webinar in which they’ll invite us to nourish ourselves with the Word of […]

Click through to read the full article Journey Through the Life of Jesus: A Lenten Webinar, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

In Lord, You Called Me: Discerning Your Path in Life, Brother Ricardo Grzona, FRP, offers 21 lectio divina encounters with God’s Word.

What do St. Paul and St. Ignatius have in common with a salesman? Josef Rodriguez, S.J. reflects on how St. Ignatius helped people find God at work in their lives.

The post St. Paul, St. Ignatius, and Salesmen | One-Minute Homily appeared first on The Jesuit Post.

By dotMagis Editor

In an episode of Pop-Up Prayer, Fr. Andy Alexander, SJ, explains that “Lent is a journey that is about what God wants to give us, and it’s a journey in freedom. It’s a journey in intimacy and relationship.” Fr. Alexander is the Director of the Collaborative Ministries Office and Online Ministries at Creighton University and […]

Click through to read the full article The Journey of Lent, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

In Lord, You Called Me: Discerning Your Path in Life, Brother Ricardo Grzona, FRP, offers 21 lectio divina encounters with God’s Word.

By dotMagis Editor

Ignatian spirituality teaches that God wants to play a role in our decisions and that through discernment we can make decisions that are aligned with God’s will for us. Joe Paprocki introduces steps to discernment in an episode of Pop-Up Catechesis. Joe is the author of more than 20 books, including 8 Steps to Energize […]

Click through to read the full article The Art of Discernment, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

In Lord, You Called Me: Discerning Your Path in Life, Brother Ricardo Grzona, FRP, offers 21 lectio divina encounters with God’s Word.

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to register for our next Moodle Academy webinar “Student partnership in assessment”, on Wednesday 7th February at 11:00-12:00 UTC, which is free to attend. At this webinar, we will welcome Rob Lowney, Senior Learning Technologist at Dublin City University.

Involving students as partners in the assessment process helps develop assessment literacy, support student engagement, and recognises students’ agency and their being experts in their own learning. Moreover, it helps support academic integrity and universal design for learning. Technology can play a key role in facilitating assessment partnership between educators and students. This webinar will share the experiences of Dublin City University (DCU) in utilising core and third-party Moodle tools to support assessment partnership, and encourage other educators to adopt these approaches into their own practice.

This webinar is part of the course ‘Moodle Academy webinars’. You have to be enrolled in the course to join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

By Gerri Leder

The priest concludes his Sunday homily before the interior doors of the church fling open. Just released from Sunday school, the young children crowd the doorway, preparing to rejoin their parents in the pews. They stand expectantly, bouncing on tippy toes, eyes darting around the church to spot their families. Off they go; the smallest […]

Click through to read the full article A Father’s Love, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

In Lord, You Called Me: Discerning Your Path in Life, Brother Ricardo Grzona, FRP, offers 21 lectio divina encounters with God’s Word.

Hearts on Fire retreats bring the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius to young people, and make them accessible.

The post Hearts on Fire: Applying the Spiritual Exercises in the 21st Century appeared first on The Jesuit Post.

Jesus's authority isn't only about rules. Noah Banasiewicz reflects on how it's about helping us make a true interior transformation.

The post A New Teaching with Authority | One-Minute Homily appeared first on The Jesuit Post.

By dotMagis Editor

We don’t want the Examen to become rote and routine. Fr. Mark Thibodeaux, SJ, thinks that as long as we make it an experience of prayer and are looking at past, present, and future, there are many ways to pray the Examen. Listen to him speak about keeping the Examen fresh in the audio clip […]

Click through to read the full article Keeping the Examen Fresh, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

In Lord, You Called Me: Discerning Your Path in Life, Brother Ricardo Grzona, FRP, offers 21 lectio divina encounters with God’s Word.

By dotMagis Editor

Ash Wednesday is February 14, 2024, so today we’re highlighting just a few of the many Ignatian-inspired features designed to help you observe Lent. The Life of Jesus Lenten Read-Along Plan now to join the 2024 Lenten read-along with Loyola Press. We’ll be reading The Life of Jesus by Andrea Tornielli. The Life of Jesus […]

Click through to read the full article Getting Ready for Lent 2024, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

In Lord, You Called Me: Discerning Your Path in Life, Brother Ricardo Grzona, FRP, offers 21 lectio divina encounters with God’s Word.

By dotMagis Editor

Fr. Kevin O’Brien, SJ, encourages individuals who feel lonely to try converting loneliness to solitude. He says, “You might find in those times of solitude resources you have not realized yet that are deep within you and ways of looking at the world which lead you to connection in new ways.” Fr. O’Brien is the […]

Click through to read the full article To Individuals Who Are Lonely, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

Finding God in the Mess by Jim Deeds and Brendan McManus, SJ, is the perfect tool to help us learn to pause, to take time to be with God, to contemplate our lives, and to recognize God’s presence in all of it, especially the hard times.

Jesus calls all people to follow him. Carlos Martinez-Vela, S.J., reflects on the call of the apostles, which is the call that all people of faith receive from Christ.

The post Is Jesus Calling You? | One-Minute Homily first appeared on The Jesuit Post.

By dotMagis Editor

The Ball of Red String by Marlene Halpin, O.P., is a classic guided meditation for children that takes little ones on an imaginative journey to a quiet place where they meet Jesus. The book is out in a new edition illustrated by Carrie Schuler. Now more than ever, amid endless screens and sensory overload, we […]

Click through to read the full article The Ball of Red String, which appeared first on Ignatian Spirituality.

IgnatianSpirituality.com ® is a service of Loyola Press, a Jesuit ministry.

Finding God in the Mess by Jim Deeds and Brendan McManus, SJ, is the perfect tool to help us learn to pause, to take time to be with God, to contemplate our lives, and to recognize God’s presence in all of it, especially the hard times.

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to register for this free webinar “Improving Moodle through UX research and data analysis” on Thursday 25th January at 10:00-11:00 UTC. At this session, we will welcome Eliot Hoving and Stuart Lamour at UCL.

UCL Moodle is one of the biggest Moodle installations in Europe. It provides an essential arena for the teaching and learning of UCL’s 51,000 students and 16,000 staff. It is also an incredibly complex Moodle that combines third party cloud infrastructure, third party development, around 200 plugins, some local and some from the community, and internal Agile based development.

In order to upgrade from Moodle 3.11 to Moodle 4.2 in 2023, the central Moodle team engaged in a process of UX and data-led discovery and analysis to re-design its landing page, dashboard, and identify areas for future course format and plugin development. Many of the results were surprising and revealed the importance of continually engaging with end users when trying to evaluate and roadmap Moodle development.

In this webinar, our invited speakers will outline the methods of UX and data analysis used at UCL and the results. They will further show how these methods can be adapted at other institutions looking to improve their Moodle.

This webinar is part of the course ‘Moodle Academy webinars’. You have to be enrolled in the course to join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’ and happy New Year to you all!

Like many of you, our teams took some time over the last few weeks to celebrate the festive season with their friends and family, but somehow still managed to smash out a ton of work!

We made great progress on delivering our Moodle Product Vision, which focuses on empowering you for life and delivering improvements designed to help you unlock your creativity, help facilitate collaboration and optimise your business & learning outcomes.

We are excited to share a few highlights of our recent efforts with you!

Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud

We are happy to announce that Custom Domains are coming to MoodleCloud. Providing our MoodleCloud Plan users with the opportunity to use their own domain name, this is one of our most highly voted new feature requests and we are thrilled to say that it’s almost here. 

Custom Domain Process 

Another Plugin will be available in Moodle Mobile Apps

In a wonderful example of collaboration with our Moodle Community, the ‘mod_checklist’ plugin will soon be supported in our Mobile Applications. This will mean that all the plugins available to our MoodleCloud Plan users will also be available in our app for the first time, rounding out the proposition for those users. 

Plugins in Apps

Course creation is getting simpler 

We’ve been thinking about how we can make creating course content in Moodle easier and help our users get creative. We started some deep dive research in this space to help us better understand how educators and learning designers create courses, what they need from the process and how we can make it better for them. 

We’ve also been working hard on improving how courses can be structured in Moodle to make them easier to navigate and provide more options for how content can be presented. 

Course Creation Discovery

Course Hierarchy Updates

Our most commonly used functions are getting better

Our activity icons and one of the most used functionalities in Moodle, the Activity Chooser, are getting a face lift. These changes are designed to help educators more quickly pick the right activities to include in their courses and make it easier for students to identify what they are working on easily. 

We are also improving the functionality provided in our ‘Browse User List’ page to make managing users faster and simpler. These updates will be incredibly helpful to Moodle Administrators who use this functionality day in and day out.

And, we continue our journey to enhance the functionality provided by our Plugin Directory, making it easier to search, find and select the right plugin for your Moodle implementations.

Activity Icons & Chooser Updates

User List Page Enhancements

Plugin Database improvements

More opportunities to learn Moodle are here

We’ve launched a brand new ‘Moodle for Learners’ Course on Moodle Academy, with functionality built in allowing the customisation of the course content for your own Moodle implementation. We’ve also got a bunch of new Webinars coming and are getting ready to launch our new Moodle Developer course soon too.

Moodle Academy Update

That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’, we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Products Team