moodle3

It is no secrete that there are high expectations around version 3.1 of Moodle that will be coming out later this month. Many have even said that 3.1 is what 3.0 was actually “meant” to be, in terms of new functionality and just general “wow.”

True to form, Moodle has already started creating the documentation for 3.1 and I happened to check out the “New Features” page, currently under development. There are already 20 new features that are slated for showcasing. Click here to follow along.

New stuff for Teachers:

1. Full support for Competency Based Education
2. Smoother and more intuitive Assignment grading
3. The ability to download select assignments for offline viewing
4. The recycle bin for easily restoring deleted content
5. The ability to pin forum posts to the top of the discussion
6. A permalink function to easily link to forum posts
7. The ability to share activities between more than one Moodle site
8. Tagging of courses for easier searching
9. Editing and creating sections without leaving the course
10. Searching for courses that are meta linked and adding them together in one step
11. The ability to restrict file types in workshops

New stuff for Admins:

1. The ability to create competency frameworks across your Moodle site
2. The development of global learning plans
3. Globally search your Moodle
4. Annotate directly on different file types
5. Search the file system repository
6. Setting default values for a lesson to make creation easier

New stuff for everyone:

1. Bulk downloads of course files to a .zip folder
2. Global search functionality

Progress Bar block which has got maximum number of votes for this years project development cycle in the Moodle Users Association voting, has been updated to a new version with new presentation options like squeeze, scroll and swipe.

In a recent update to the most popular block plugin for Moodle, Michael de Raadt, the Maintainer of Progress Bar block and Research Director at Moodle HQ has posted about the changes in the new version of the block.

Now you can display the bar in 3 different ways:

* Squeezed into one horizontal bar
* Scrolling sideways to show overflowing bar segments
* Wrapping to show all bar segments on multiple lines

Which means that your users will get a much better user experience in your course.

Moodle 3.1 the next LTS version of Moodle which was scheduled to be release in the Second week of May is delayed by 2 weeks due to final touch-up of amazing new features coming in this version.

Recently during one of our training events, a participant had a need to prevent students from posting to forums from earlier in a course.

The course in question ran over a number of months and included several forum activities addressing specific topics at different stages in the course.

It was difficult for the tutor to devote time to monitoring all of the forums within the course; the tutor, therefore, wanted to “lock” the forums so that, whilst students should still be able to review the discussion threads from earlier forums, they should not be able to post to them.

In Moodle, whilst you can control when a forum can be accessed (using the Restrict access functionality), there are no options in the Forum settings page to control when people are allowed to post to the forum.

The solution to this participant’s specific need lay, therefore, within overriding the Student role’s permissions within an activity. The solution is explained below:

1. As a teacher, when you are ready to prevent your students from posting to a forum, click on the forum activity from the course page.

2. In the Administration block, select Forum administration > Permissions

3. From the Advanced role override drop-down list, select Student

4. For the Reply to posts and Start new discussions capabilities, set the Permission to Prevent.

5. Scroll down and click on the Save changes.

6. Students will now be able to access the forum activity as before, but will no longer be able to post nor create new discussions in that particular forum.

On the 31st of March, Martin Dougiamas, founder and CEO of Moodle received an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Vic – Central University of Catalonia.

Moodle 3.1 the next LTS version of Moodle which was scheduled to be release in the Second week of May is delayed by 2 weeks due to final touch-up of amazing new features coming in this version.

Recently, in the Moodle.org forums, Gareth Barnard announced a substantial update to the Essential Theme for Moodle 2.9 and 3.0. There are a good deal of both new features and fixes for both versions.

Gareth provided highlights to the update as follows:

- He’s done a good deal of work making the header look better. This includes a much bigger profile image when you’re at the top of the page and the navbar is below the logo or social icon area.
- He’s also put a dotted line in-between the social icons so that they don’t look like they’re smashed together.
- The style guide (a cool new feature added in the last update) can now be accessed without logging on at yoursite/theme/essential/pages/styleguide.php.
- He’s implemented a number of fixes to fonts and colors for better accessibility.
- He’s given the logo a width setting so that it is more customizable.
- He’s made it so that the footer moves to the bottom (and actually a bit further) where the content on the page would leave space below the footer.