MoodleMoot US 2016 is happening in Los Angeles on 21-23 June 2016.
The event will give you the chance to watch presentations from knowledgeable keynote speakers, meet with members of the Moodle HQ team and best of all, share your own Moodle experience with others.
Registrations close in 13 days - register now to secure your place!
I'm pleased to announce the release of Moodle Mobile 3.1 for Android and iOS. The app is available now on Google Play and will be in the App store soon: see download.moodle.org/mobile.
This release enables students to attempt quizzes* on the move in the app. You can also allow quizzes to be downloaded and attempted offline* by installing the new quiz offline attempts plugin. (*Requires Moodle 2.6 onwards and the Moodle Mobile additional features plugin.)
Another release highlight if you are planning on using competencies in Moodle 3.1, is that students will be able to browse their learning plans, and teachers will be able to view the competencies of their students.
Please see the Moodle Mobile 3.1 release notes for the full list of features, improvements and fixes in this release.
Team Moodle has been incredibly busy for the past few months bringing together another major release of Moodle.
Moodle 3.1 wraps a lot of new features together with hundreds of fixes and improvements into a package that we'll be supporting for the next three years, 1.5 years longer than most releases.
I am proud to announce that the most important new feature in this release is the new core support for competencies, which is something we've been talking about and developing in the community for many years. These help when Moodle is used for competency-based education (CBE), "mastery learning" and any technique that involves learning plans based on the things students know, and the things they are yet to know.
Our HQ developers (in collaboration with the community and significant contributions of development and design from the Université de Montréal) have now added strong basic interfaces for these in core, allowing competencies to be determined automatically via coursework or manually by examination of uploaded evidence. However we fully expect these core interfaces to be further extended by the community via plugins and integrations to suit all the many niches where Moodle is used.
This release also marks the first time a new feature has been chosen by the Moodle Users Association. In this case it was the Recycle Bin, a plugin written by Skylar Kelty at the University of Kent, now reviewed and included as a standard feature in Moodle 3.1.
These are just a couple of highlights from a long list of new features. Our videos below explain more.
For full details, see the Moodle 3.1 release notes, or just download Moodle now and get started!
If you're upgrading pay special attention to the upgrading information. Of course, you don't need to worry about this if you're one of the 18,693 sites using MoodleCloud - you'll find that your site has been magically upgraded already today!
As always a very special thank you to everyone in the community who've helped us put this release together, 121 developers from 23 countries including Moodle HQ, Moodle Partners, QA testers, documenters and everyone else. Hugs all round!
Watch this space for a co-announcement from Juan about the new Moodle Mobile 3.1 release, which is designed to work well with Moodle 3.1 (and earlier versions too).
And now for us it's onwards and upwards to Moodle 3.2 in November, with some exciting things planned!
Cheers,
Martin Dougiamas, Founder and CEO of Moodle Pty Ltd
A big thank you to all our Quality Assurance (QA) testers, as listed in the Testing credits, who helped us achieve a Moodle 3.1 test pass rate of 100% in 3½ weeks. Congratulations to everyone who received a Moodle tester 2016 badge for running three or more tests in the QA cycle.
Thanks also to all our developers, who helped with fixing bugs identified through testing, so that tests could be reset and run again as quickly as possible. Thus we are all ready for the 3.1 release next week!
If you'd like to meet up with other Moodlers in person, here's a list of Moodle conferences coming up in the next few months:
If you're organising a Moodle event and would like it added to the moodle.org calendar, please get in touch.
(Edited by Helen Foster to add additional dates - originally posted 28 March 2016.)
Moodle 3.0.4, 2.9.6, 2.8.12 and 2.7.14 are now available via the usual open download channels: https://download.moodle.org or Git.
In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, security vulnerabilities have been discovered and fixed. We highly recommend that you upgrade your sites as soon as possible. Upgrading should be very straightforward. As per our usual policy, admins of all registered Moodle sites will be notified of security issue details directly via email and we'll publish details more widely in a week.Other details can be found in our notes for each release:
We're planning on releasing Moodle 3.1 in four weeks time, and so we're once again running a Quality Assurance (QA) testing cycle. The list of over 500 tests includes tests covering new features in Moodle 3.1.
If you can spare any time and would like to volunteer to help, please see the discussion Help needed with Moodle 3.1 QA testing for details of how you can be involved.
Thanks in advance for your help with our next version of Moodle!
Congratulations and welcome to our four Google Summer of Code 2016 students, who will be working on their Moodle projects over the next 3-4 months:
Please give our new Moodle developers help and encouragement wherever you can!
I'm pleased to announce that Martin Dougiamas, founder and leader of the Moodle project, has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia, in recognition of his decisive contribution in the field of education. The award ceremony was held on 31 March 2016 at the Central University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. See Visita a Catalunya de Martin Dougiamas, nou doctor honoris causa de la UVic-UCC for details of Martin's visit to Catalonia.
When accepting his honorary doctorate, Martin stated that he was accepting the award on behalf of the worldwide Moodle community.
