Latest Moodle News

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to join us for our next Moodle Academy webinar, which is free to attend. Please note: This webinar will be in French.

Webinaire: La gestion des rôles dans Moodle
5 février, 13:00-14:00 UTC
Inscrivez-vous!

Lors de ce webinaire, nous accueillerons Nicolas Martignoni, Enseignant et formateur à Fribourg, Suisse.

Les rôles de Moodle sont une des clefs de la flexibilité de son utilisation. Cependant, la gestion de ces rôles est complexe et assez difficile d'accès. Ce webinaire, destiné avant tout aux administrateurs et administratrices de Moodle, mais aussi à toute personne curieuse du fonctionnement interne de Moodle, se donne comme objectif d'améliorer la compréhension de l'architecture des rôles de Moodle et, à l'aide d'exemples, de trucs et d'astuces, de rendre plus digeste l'administration de ces rôles. Des bonnes pratiques de gestion des rôles dans Moodle seront également présentées.

Ce webinaire fait partie du cours 'Moodle Academy webinars'. Il faut vous inscrire au cours pour participer au webinaire.

Inscrivez-vous à Moodle Academy!

by Helen Foster.  

In addition to our Site policy, we have a Code of conduct that applies to all forums and other activities on moodle.org and the Moodle Plugins directory.

We will shortly be updating the Site policy to include a link to the Code of conduct.

You will be required to accept the updated Site policy the next time you log in.

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to join us for this free webinar, on Tuesday 21 January at 10:00-11:00 UTC, to discover the rebranded Moodle Educator Qualification (MEQ), previously known as Moodle Educator Certification (MEC) and the new Moodle Administrator Qualification (MAQ). Designed for educators and administrators, this session will provide an in-depth overview of these globally recognised programs. Whether you're an educator seeking to validate and showcase your Moodle teaching skills or an administrator looking to demonstrate your proficiency in managing Moodle sites, this webinar will equip you with everything you need to get started with Moodle Qualifications.

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 Helen Foster.  

We are looking for volunteers to help us to improve the Moodle.org website homepage and navigation.

This survey has 9 to 11 questions and should take no more than 5 minutes to complete.

The survey is anonymous. However you will have the option to give your email address to go into a prize draw to win a US$75 gift card.

Update 8 January 2025: The survey is now closed and the link has been removed. As always, you are welcome to share your feedback about Moodle.org in the Moodle community sites forum.

by Sandra Matz.  

We’re happy to share that the rebranding from Moodle Certifications to Moodle Qualifications is now fully complete! Key updates include:

• New platform URL: qualifications.moodle.com.

• Updated branding across site, materials, and certificates.

• Transition to MEQ and MAQ terminology across all resources.

For more information, please refer to the initial announcement: Exciting changes ahead: Introducing Moodle Qualifications!

Thank you for your support in making this transition a success.

by Sandra Matz.  

We are excited to share that Moodle Certifications will soon be rebranded as Moodle Qualifications. This updated and globally recognised program, set to launch in December, aims to provide professionals using Moodle with more opportunities. As part of this change, the highly regarded Moodle Educator Certification (MEC) will be renamed the Moodle Educator Qualification (MEQ).

Additionally, starting in 2025, we will introduce the brand-new Moodle Administrator Qualification (MAQ), which is designed for experienced Moodle Administrators.

Whether you’re an educator or an administrator, Moodle Qualifications are your ticket to future-proofing your skills. They’re designed to align with global standards, making them invaluable credentials for advancing your career and boosting the impact of your teaching or site administration.

So, are you ready to take your next step with Moodle? Start your journey today, whether it’s through the MEQ, or preparing for the MAQ. Head to Moodle Academy for free training, or contact one of our Moodle Certified Partners and Service Providers for personalised, expert-led guidance.

Learn more about MEQ.

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

 

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’!

 

It’s been a very busy time at Moodle Products over the last few weeks, with many of our team members attending MoodleMoot Global in Merida, Mexico. We had a blast spending time with over 350 members of our community, celebrating all things Moodle with them. The event’s agenda was full of fantastic talks, which can be viewed on the Moodle YouTube channel, our ever popular Jam events, and the famous Moodle Party.

 

On November 5th, we were very proud to announce the release of Moodle Workplace 4.5. From advanced course discovery and curated offerings in the Learning Catalogue, to AI-driven tools designed to elevate content creation, the new release focuses on making learning more engaging, accessible, and tailored. We invite you to find out all about its benefits by checking out our release announcement. 

 

Upon returning from Mexico, the team dived right into planning mode to finalise our plans for the next  Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace releases. 

 

Some of the highlights you can expect to see come to life include:

• A range of new AI-driven functionality, including integration options with more AI providers (AWS Bedrock and Ollama are next on our list) and new capabilities to help students get more out of their learning experiences in Moodle, such as actions to support translations and other personalisation of learning content options (check out the roadmap for all the details)!

• Much-needed improvements to the Assignment Grader experience, making grading easier for teachers (check out the prototypes here & here to see where we are heading)

• Optimisations to our Administration Settings, including smarter search functionality and more user-friendly descriptions of key settings (MFA settings will be first off the rank).

• The retiring of functionality that make Moodle harder to use and run than it should be, including the removal of the Chat & Survey tools, the Atto text editor and support for Oracle Databases (don’t worry, Chat, Survey and Atto will remain available as plugins for the few of you who still need them).

• More goodness for LTI lovers, with the migration of mod_lti into core. This will enable the use of LTI placements in the text editor, course navigation and assignments (find out more here).

• The launch of support for SMS notifications, critical for everyone in the world who doesn’t always have access to the internet but still wants to stay connected to their learning (which is still more than 34% of the world’s population - about 2.6 billion people!).

• For our Workplace customers, you can expect to see data visualisations come to report builder (charts are coming!), improvements to multi-tenant settings, programs available in the course catalogue and, the much much requested ‘user in multiple tenants’ functionality.

 

We will also complete our next MUA project, the upgrade to Bootstrap 5.0, and all our products (including our beloved Mobile Applications) will go through their annual accessibility audits and be certified to WCAG 2.2 (vs 2.1) for the first time.

 

With all the travel and the planning work, we don’t have a lot to share in terms of demo videos this time around, but we did think you’d like to see what a team gets up to during a release sprint, so here is the Showcase Short from the Moodle Workplace team in full. You’ll notice they don’t stop for a release, and the improvements keep coming!

Go to the forum to see the video! 

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

 

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Product Team

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to register for the Moodle Academy free webinar “Utilising the Backward Design Process to Rethink a Training Program” on Tuesday 3rd December at 15:00-16:00 UTC.

At this webinar we will welcome Amy Sudduth, Learning Designer in the Moodle US team at Moodle HQ.

This presentation will highlight the process used to transform a government agency's new hire training program with the collaboration of SMEs, learning designers, and Moodle experts. Embracing the backward design model and leveraging Moodle’s versatile features, both asynchronous and synchronous tools were seamlessly integrated to cater to diverse learning needs throughout the new hire training program. This presentation will focus on the process, tools used and outcomes of the redesigned program.

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.  

We invite you to register for the Moodle Academy free webinar “Moodle Tool Guide” on Wednesday 20th November at 09:00-10:00 UTC.

The Moodle Tool Guide, first created by Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamas) in 2010 for Moodle (version 1.9) has had an update and refresh for subsequent Moodle versions, including Gavin Henrick for Moodle 2.

Richard Oelmann and Tish Kirkland have each built on Seitzinger's initial work to create 2 further versions. In this webinar, they will each discuss their respective versions of the Tool Guide.

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 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:

• Moodle Workplace 4.5 Release Notes
• Moodle Workplace 4.5 New Features
• Moodle LMS 4.5: Unlock the power of AI for your courses

Cheers,

Emilio Lozano
Head of Workplace Solutions

by Richard Lefroy.  

Join us for the Moodle Academy webinar “Creating TinyMCE plugins for Moodle” on Thursday 7 November, 03:00 UTC

In this webinar the Moodle HQ and Tiny teams will dive into the integration of the TinyMCE editor within Moodle, now the default editor replacing Atto. This session is tailored for Moodle developers, and  guides you through creating custom TinyMCE plugins and migrating existing Atto plugins to TinyMCE.

Unlock TinyMCE’s full potential to enhance the editing experience and explore valuable resources for  developers. This is a must-attend event for anyone looking to elevate their development skills and make the most of TinyMCE in Moodle.

Agenda:

• Overview of TinyMCE editor in Moodle.
• Steps on creating TinyMCE plugins for Moodle.
• How to convert Atto plugins to TinyMCE.
• Maximizing the functionality of TinyMCE in Moodle.
• Developer resources and TinyMCE premium plugin options.
• Live Q&A session with experts.

Speakers:

• Andrew Lyons, Principal Architect at Moodle HQ.
• Mrina Sugosh, DevRel at TinyMCE.

We recommend checking out these resources to help you get the most out of the session before you attend the webinar:

• TinyMCE Editor Plugins - Moodle Docs: Familiarize yourself with how TinyMCE plugins work within Moodle.
• Creating TinyMCE Plugins - Moodle Academy Course: Learn how to create custom TinyMCE plugins through this step-by-step course.

This will provide a solid foundation for the topics covered in the webinar!

This webinar is part of the course 'Creating TinyMCE Plugins'. You have to be enrolled in this free course to register and join the webinar.