by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to join us for the next Moodle Academy free webinar “Environmental awareness as a core digital competence” that we have rescheduled to Thursday 13 April, 8:00-9:00 UTC.

The development of digital literacy and digital competencies are widely recognised as essential in our increasingly digitised world. However, as we begin to come to terms with the extent of the climate crisis facing the world, this webinar asks the question: is it time for digital literacy to focus its attention on the impact our digital activity has on the environment? 

At this webinar, which is free to attend, we will hear from Dr Peter Tiernan, Lecturer at the School of STEM Education, Innovation and Global Studies at Dublin City University in Ireland. The presenter will begin by examining popular digital tools and services used for entertainment and work purposes and highlight their environmental impact and potential mitigating factors. Following this, he will examine definitions of digital literacy to reveal a complex set of competencies which, as yet do not engage with the environmental impact of our activity. The speaker will then examine widely used digital literacy frameworks and exposes their relative lack of engagement with the environmental impact of our digital lives. 

Finally, he will urge further discussion on environmental impact as a component of digital literacy and propose ways to achieve this with his students, using the language of existing digital literacy definitions. And he will present the audience with a suggested framework addition which addresses these concerns.

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

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Simey Lameze.  

Hi everyone, we're running another Quality Assurance (QA) testing cycle to test the next version of Moodle - 4.2.

Our QA cycle starts today 20th of March and we'll be running it for 5 weeks until the scheduled release of Moodle 4.2 on the 24th of April.

If you'd like to try out Moodle 4.2 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.

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to join us for the Moodle Academy free webinar “Make the most of the Moodle Mobile App” on Thursday 23 March, 11:00-12:00 UTC.

There is a lot you can do to improve the Moodle Mobile App experience in your institution. In this free webinar, you will learn how to improve the overall user experience of your Mobile App users.

You will understand how to reduce the login process friction, make the app most appealing to end-users and how to create content that really works in a mobile environment.

At this session we will hear from Juan Leyva, Head of Mobile Solutions at Moodle HQ.

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

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Aurélie Soulier.  

Hi Community Members!

As you may already know, this year’s MoodleMoot Global will be held in Barcelona (Spain) on the 18-21 September 2023, starting with the pre-conference on the 18th, followed by the conference from the 19th September. We hope that you will be able to join us! Further details will be announced soon but, in the meantime, you can register your interest in attending.

While we hope to see you in Barcelona for the biggest Moodle community event of this year, we are already starting to make plans for MoodleMoot Global 2024. Following up on feedback received at previous events, we have decided to move the Global MoodleMoot to a new location and we have shortlisted a few options and would love to hear which one of them our community members would prefer as the location for our Global MoodleMoot and where you would like to travel to join us in 2024!

If you would like to choose your preferred location, please complete this survey form by Friday 10th March at 23:59 UTC.

• Indonesia
• Mexico
• India
• Other

Please note that, whilst we value the Moodle community preference for a MoodleMoot Global location, there are a lot of factors to consider, so the most popular option may not necessarily be the selected one for next year;  however, we will refer to  your feedback as we select locations for our future MoodleMoot Global events.

Thank you for your contribution!

Best wishes,

MoodleMoot Global team

by Marie Achour.  

Hello Community Members,

Are you ready for our 5th edition of Showcase Shorts?

We are barrelling towards Moodle LMS Version 4.2 with only a few short weeks left before code freeze and the start of our QA review cycle in preparation for our release on the 24th of April. 

Talking about QA, we continue to optimise our approach to testing. Simey Lameze, our Test Automation Specialist, shares the progress we are making in this video.

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Our LMS teams have been working on improving our user experience and evolving our technology, in line with our strategic objectives for the platform. This sprint saw them make great progress on a number of initiatives:

1. TinyMCE Integration: work on this initiative has prompted a broader review of how plugin settings are managed more broadly across the platform. Watch a demo from Andrew Lyons, our Principal Architect for Moodle LMS, to see what we’ve been up to.

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2. Matrix Integration: we made it happen, you can now launch a new Matrix chat room directly from within a Moodle course! See it for yourself, as presented by Safat Shahin and Robert van Garderen, two of our newest team members.

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3. Gradebook: more enhancements to the look and feel of the Grader Report and easier Gradebook set ups are coming. Join Mihail Geshoski and Barbara Ramiro to see what we are working on.

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4. Bulk Editing: our MUA sponsored initiative is almost ready for a demo. Hear from Ferran Recio Caldero, our teacher in residence, to see where we are up to with delivery.

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5. Course Hierarchy & other UX improvements: Changes highly requested by our community are now ready for integration. Amaia Anabitarte and Sara Arjona Tellez share what you can expect to see in Moodle LMS 4.2 in this video.

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6. Activity Cards & Icons Redesign: We’ve received a ton of feedback from you all about further changes you’d like to see made to our activity cards and icons. Watch Sabina Abellan, our busiest UX designer, share the outcomes of our co-design efforts with community members so far. These changes will come to fruition in Moodle LMS 4.3.

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As always, our Mobile Applications, MoodleCloud instances and Moodle Workplace solution will also launch their 4.2 versions in the weeks that follow the Moodle LMS release — so there is lots of action happening across all areas of Moodle Products at the moment!

You can watch the latest developments on Moodle Workplace, presented by Emilio Lozano, our Head of Workplace Solutions, in this video including the progress being made on the development of Learning Catalogues.

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On the mobile front, the team have been focusing on improving Audio & Video playback in IOS and introducing Report Builder into the app. Watch Juan Leyva, our Head of Mobile Solutions, takes us through these recent developments.

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And, as has now become a tradition to make sure you keep reading to the end, we focus on all thing Community last in our note! Check out the latest improvements coming soon to our moodle.org and Academy sites in this presentation by Aurelie Soulier, Federico Astorga and Aya Saad.

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Until next sprint!

The Moodle Products Team

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to join us for the Moodle Academy free webinar “Could Moodle reduce gender inequities?” on Wednesday 15 March, 9:00-10:00 UTC.

Recent research on gender minorities showed that more males than females dropped out  during their first year of studying Engineering. One possible reason could be the difference in their use or take-up of Moodle.

It is well known that day to day studying is more difficult for minorities. If the face to face element is tougher, might the remote element help females to stay engaged with the curriculum? In order to answer this question, the use rate of Moodle by male and female  Engineering students at various levels was observed before and during exam periods.

In this session, which is free to attend, Agnès Peeters from Haute École Bruxelles-Brabant (HE2B) in Belgium will present the statistical results and suggest some ways Moodle could help (gender) minorities at university level.

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

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Sandra Matz.  

Unfortunately the free webinar “Environmental awareness as a core digital competence” on Tuesday 21 February, 9:00-10:00 UTC has been cancelled.

We are sorry for the inconvience and plan to reschedule it soon. The information about the webinar is below.

The development of digital literacy and digital competencies are widely recognised as essential in our increasingly digitised world. However, as we begin to come to terms with the extent of the climate crisis facing the world, this webinar asks the question: is it time for digital literacy to focus its attention on the impact our digital activity has on the environment? 

At this webinar, which is free to attend, we will hear from Peter Tiernan, Lecturer at the School of STEM Education, Innovation and Global Studies at Dublin City University in Ireland. The presenter will begin by examining popular digital tools and services used for entertainment and work purposes and highlight their environmental impact and potential mitigating factors. Following this, he will examine definitions of digital literacy to reveal a complex set of competencies which, as yet do not engage with the environmental impact of our activity. The speaker will then examine widely used digital literacy frameworks and exposes their relative lack of engagement with the environmental impact of our digital lives. 

Finally, he will urge further discussion on environmental impact as a component of digital literacy and propose ways to achieve this with his students, using the language of existing digital literacy definitions. And he will present the audience with a suggested framework addition which addresses these concerns.

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

Register at Moodle Academy.

(Edited by Mary Cooch - original submission Wednesday, 15 February 2023, 10:33 AM)

by Aurélie Soulier.  

Hello Moodlers!

The Moodle Community team is delighted to announce the winners of the Share your Moodle love 🧡🎓 competition!
We would like to thank everyone who entered the competition and all that have voted.
Sharing good practice and helping inspire each other is key to our Moodle open-source community.
All the entries were brilliant and, after your votes on the competition entries, and thanks to the judges, we can now announce the winner and runner-up for the competition!

These courses showed how they used learning design with Moodle tools, pushing the boundaries, and experimenting with Moodle to improve participants’ engagement and the learning experience.

1. In first place, a fab course from Dunja Speckner:  “Come, lets explore the world of AI and Chatbots” - well worth a look if you haven’t seen it already!

2. In second place, Stefan Scholz offered us a peek at an inspiring and gamified “Teacher’s Paradise”.

The winner and runner-up have been contacted so they can claim their prizes and they will be allocated a badge each too.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next competition and challenge! 

In the meantime, make sure you enrol on the Competition centre to keep updated, and go check out the fabulous 14 great examples of Moodle courses that have been submitted.

Much Moodle Love to you all.
Aurélie and the Community Team

by Matt Porritt.  

Hi Everyone,
At Moodle we want to ensure that the way we release our software is meeting the needs of our users. To assist with this we are asking our community members to complete the linked short survey.

This survey aims to gather information about how you and your organisation, approach Moodle LMS version upgrades to help determine:

1. If our current release cadence of Moodle LMS is meeting the needs of our users, and;
2. To help understand the challenges around Moodle LMS upgrades for organisations.

We encourage all of you to complete this survey. The information gathered is important as you and your organisations are the ones that use Moodle LMS everyday for your teaching and learning.

The survey can be accessed directly from: https://c7slel7jlte.typeform.com/to/wS7xsoQL
Or via the QR code below

Regards,
Matt Porritt, Platform Manager LMS

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to join us for the next Moodle Academy webinar "Facilitating Moodle Forums" on Thursday 16 February 2023, 13:00-14:00 UTC.

In this free webinar, we will explore the different types of Moodle forums and offer tips on facilitating and moderating forums to foster a lively but safe online community.

The webinar is suitable for anyone who wants to improve their use of Moodle forums to engage learners.

Note: This webinar is part of the free course 'Facilitating Moodle Forums'. You have to be enrolled in the course to join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

by Aurélie Soulier.  

Hello Moodlers!

Are we in the Moodle for love?
We now have 14 brilliant entries for the 'Share your Moodle love 🧡🎓' competition. There's one week left to vote!

We’d like you to vote for the Moodle course design(s) that you love. You have until Monday 13 January 2023 at 23:59 UTC to vote for a great course, and we have a prize for the winner and runner-up (and badges)  to be announced on 14th February 2023.

Head to the Competition Centre to read the rules and vote for your favourite Moodle course design, now.

Note: you need to self-enrol in the Competition Centre and remain enrolled for your vote to count! Vote are on each single entry (not in 'list view).

Best wishes and good luck to all the 14 great entries!
Aurélie and the Community Sites team

by Sandra Matz.  

We invite you to join us for the Moodle Academy webinar "Using H5P effectively in Moodle" on Wednesday 8 February 2023, 8:00-9:00 UTC.

During this webinar, which is free to attend, we will explore how to get the most out of H5P. During the session we will share tips, tricks and strategies to help you enhance your Moodle courses with H5P.

The webinar will be co-presented by Sara Arjona, Developer at Moodle HQ, and Michelle Lomman, Education Manager at MyLearningSpace.

Make sure you're not missing out on ways to engage your learners!

This webinar is suitable for educators interested in using H5P in Moodle.

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

You can register for this free webinar at Moodle Academy.

by Sandra Matz.  

Please join us for the Moodle Academy webinar “Moodle offline - Reaching marginalised communities” on Thursday 2 February 2023, 9:00-10:00 UTC.

Inclusiv Education supports Save the Children projects in Low to Middle income countries around the world to reach even the most marginalised communities and provide them with education and professional development training. 

A key part of their strategy is to introduce their Inclusiv Learning Platform (iLP) and the iLP Box, that allows people to connect their devices (may it be laptops, tablets or phones) in an offline environment. The ILP Box has been configured for eLearning even when there is no internet or no electricity. They have installed Moodle as an offline Learning Management System, so children, teachers and parents can use either the browser or the app to connect to Moodle and access digital content.

During this webinar the presenters will be sharing their experiences with the challenges that they faced and the lessons they have learnt so far.

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

You can register for the webinar at Moodle Academy.

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