by Emilio Lozano.
Dear Moodle Community,
We’re so excited to share that Moodle Workplace 4.5 is here! 🥳
A huge thanks to the amazing Moodle team for all the hard work they’ve put into Moodle Workplace 4.5 and Moodle LMS 4.5! This release is packed with awesome new features that make it easier (and more fun!) to discover courses, personalize learning, and manage users.
From more curated and customisable course discovery tools in the revamped Learning Catalogue to fresh options for site customisation and people management, Moodle Workplace 4.5 is all about making learning more accessible, engaging, and tailored just for your organisation.
Let’s jump in and have a closer look at everything new:
Better course discovery with Learning Catalogue improvements
- Course highlighting: Spotlight specific courses in the Catalogue, ensuring that those courses always appear at the top of the list on the Catalogue landing page. This allows you to better promote new, important or recommended courses, making it easy for learners to find and focus on what matters most.
- New Featured Courses section on the Catalogue page: Direct learners to key courses and ensure they appear prominently in the Catalogue by using the new, customisable Featured Courses section, which appears on the Catalogue landing page. By curating the course discovery process for your learners, you can help them find high-priority courses.
- Automatic price synchronisation: With automatic price synchronisation, you can effortlessly display accurate course prices in the Catalogue by linking the new “Number” custom course field to enrolment plugins. No more manual pricing updates means that admins will save time while also ensuring that users always see the correct course price in the Catalogue.
- New custom fields and filters: Easily filter by fields such as price and duration for tailored course views make it easier for learners to find courses that meet their specific needs. Some of the changes you’ll see when searching in the new Catalogue include:
- Range filters - Allow learners to filter courses by price, duration, or other numerical values that draw from the new Number course custom field, providing a tailored view of courses that fit their needs. (Only have a few minutes to spare? Search for micro-learnings that take between 1-15 minutes to complete.)
- Checkbox filters - The checkbox custom course field allows you to label a course in whatever way you choose (“New,” “Fully online,” “Facilitated,” “Monthly selection” - the options are endless), and now your learners can filter by these fields in the Catalogue, making it easier for them to find the courses you most want them to see.
- Highlight active filters - Provides a helpful visual cue by showing the number of active filters, making it easy for learners to navigate the Catalogue and hone in on exactly what they’re looking for.
- Hide or customise labels for fields and filters - Improved options for hiding or customising labels for Catalogue display fields and filters means the Catalogue can be more fully adapted to meet an organisation’s course discovery needs.
- Better image loading - For performance reasons, the Catalogue now serves smaller size course images, improving page load times.
New options for site customisation
- New Start page options: You now have the option to choose the Learning Catalogue or Custom Pages as the default homepage for learners. First impressions matter, and this change gives you more options for creating a branded, personalised path for learners through your Moodle Workplace site.
- Unlisted Custom Pages: Create specialised site pages for unique audiences without cluttering up the primary navigation bar. This allows you to build customised content pages for your users that can be linked to anywhere on the site, unlocking endless possibilities when it comes to branding, resource sharing, and designing personalised dashboards for different groups of users.
- Easily copy URL for Custom Pages: We’ve added an action to the Custom Pages landing page that allows you to easily copy the URL for a specific Custom Page. This makes it easier to grab these URL’s when linking to them throughout the site, sending communications to users, or any other time you need to link directly to a Custom Page.
More personalised multi-tenancy
- Custom Tenant domains: Custom tenant domains are here! No longer an experimental feature, your tenants can now each have their own, fully branded, tenant-specific URLs and no-reply email addresses. This helps Admins with site organisation and allows your tenants to create a more customised site, with personalised automated notifications, thus reinforcing brand consistency and building trust with learners. One last note - for those of you who used the experimental feature, we have created detailed instructions on how to migrate the settings.
- User Tour Tenant selector: The introduction of a tenant user tour selector means that you can customise onboarding tours by tenant. More personalised options for tenant-specific user tours mean that your tenants have more choice about how, when, and where to orient users to their site.
Simplified people management
- Allocate users to Programs and Certifications from the Team Overview block: Organisation managers can now allocate their team members to Programs and Certifications directly from the Team Overview block, which is most commonly found on the My Teams page. This allows Managers and Department Leads to easily assign learning to their teams all in one place, saving time and effort.
- Add a new user in the “People” tab: With the ability to create new users directly within the Organisation Structure, HR Managers no longer need to use the full Site Administration menu for user management. This saves clicks, time, and allows you to complete common user management tasks all on one page.
- New “User is manager” Dynamic Rules condition: A new "User is Manager" Dynamic Rules condition allows admins to create automations specifically for managers of any type. This enables Admins to create more precise, tailored workflows that better address the unique needs of the different types of managers within their organisation.
- More accurate Organisation Structure Dynamic Rules conditions: Conditions and actions for positions and departments in Dynamic Rules will only be available if there are corresponding positions or departments in your organisation. For example, if your organisation structure does not use Departments, you will not see Department as an option when creating dynamic rules, thus simplifying and adapting the interface to your site’s unique configuration.
Improvements for large sites
- Better interface for moving users between Tenants: Effortlessly bulk-transfer users with an intuitive new modal interface. This makes it much faster and easier to search for a tenant when transferring a user from one tenant to another, an improvement essential for large sites with many tenants.
- Improve Department and Position selectors: By adding search functionality and displaying the hierarchical path from the Organisation Structure, you can now effortlessly navigate and identify relevant Positions and Departments anywhere in the site where you need to make selections for automations. This makes it faster and easier to assign jobs, create Reports, Dynamic Rules, Custom Pages, and any other content you want to tailor to users in specific Positions and Departments.
- Adding tags to Dynamic Rules: Dynamic Rules can now be organised with tags, making it easier for Admins to manage and categorise them using terms that make sense for your organisation.
Improvements for learners
- Simplified access to learning reports: The “Learning” section in a user’s profile now provides a clear, visual warning indicator for overdue Programs and Certifications. This helps learners take ownership over their own development by easily monitoring their learning progress.
- Session availability filter for Appointments: Appointment activity sessions can now be filtered by “Session availability,” a feature that helps optimise scheduling for both learners and instructors.
Improvements for site management
- Create courses within Program content editing: Create new courses directly while editing a Program. This allows Program creators to stay on task and map out a full sequence of courses without needing to stop and navigate elsewhere.
- Include date when manually certifying a user: You can now input a certification date when manually marking a Certification as complete for a user, an improvement that helps organisations update historical completion data.
- New “username” placeholder for notifications with Dynamic Rules: Enhance site communication by using the new “username” placeholder in Dynamic Rules notifications. Being able to automatically remind a user of their username helps you create more personalised, relevant messages that encourage users to continually engage with your site.
- Use Textarea user profile field for Dynamic Rules conditions: You now have a new option to select Textarea user profile fields as a Dynamic Rules condition, an improvement which allows you more flexibility for creating site automations.
- New “Workplace” plugins filter in Plugins Overview: Moodle Workplace plugins are now distinctly categorised as “Workplace” plugins on the plugins overview page, rather than "Additional". This enhancement includes a quick filter, an improvement that helps Admins more efficiently manage their site by making it easy to view and select only Workplace plugins.
Each of these improvements is designed with your organisational needs in mind to simplify processes and enhance learner experiences.
And, as with all Moodle Workplace releases, remember that you also get all of the new features and enhancements of Moodle LMS. Be sure to check these out using the link below:
Cheers,
Emilio Lozano
Head of Workplace Solutions