Moodle

by Martin Dougiamas.  Hi all,Several weeks ago we ran a short Gradebook survey to gather some of your feedback in preparation for the Moodle Gradebook workshop in Long Beach, California on June 11-12.  Thank you to more than 600 of you who provided ... [More] the group with some terrific rich data to work with.The working group has distilled some of the key issues into a second survey with more specific targeted questions, and we would love to get responses from those of you working with the Moodle gradebook to help us further.The survey is here:  Moodle Gradebook Enhancement SurveyPlease spread this link around to Moodle teachers that you know!Thanks for contributing to Moodle with your feedback! [Less]

by Martin Dougiamas.  Perhaps it's not as exciting as a major release like 2.7 but important all the same:  our latest stable point releases: Moodle 2.6.3, 2.5.6, and 2.4.10 are now available via the usual open download channels: ... [More] http://download.moodle.org or Git. In addition to a number of bug fixes and small improvements, security vulnerabilities have been discovered and fixed.  If you are on any 2.6, 2.5 or 2.4 version already then we highly recommend that you upgrade your sites to these latest versions as soon as possible.  Upgrading should be very straightforward.  As per our usual policy, admins of all registered Moodle sites have already been 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: Moodle 2.6.3 release notesMoodle 2.5.6 release notesMoodle 2.4.10 release notes Note that 2.5 and 2.4 are now supported for serious security issues only. [Less]

by Martin Dougiamas.  Hello!   ¡Hola!   你好!    Salut!    Γειά σας!   Hallo!I'm proud to announce the next milestone in Moodle's steady growth:  Moodle 2.7.  If you're in a hurry visit our download page or our release notes for full details.Our ... [More] latest release puts a nice Moodle hat on top of six months of planning, conversations via every medium, meetings at all hours, arguments (usually constructive), worry, long coding sessions, organisation, chaos, conferences and mojitos among developers, teachers, administrators in many countries around the world, integrated by Moodle HQ.  About 104 developers have code credits in this release (including 23 from Moodle HQ).As usual hundreds of bugs were found and fixed.  In addition we have our usual mix of new features that everyone can see and new features that developers and administrators care about.Highlights of the new features include:Improved interfaces for usability and accessibility on all platforms.  Bootstrap themes are now default.New Atto editor with tighter integration into Moodle and browsers.New More theme allowing easy customisation via the user interface. Improved conditional activities supporting more complex boolean operations and plugins.New mathematical equation editor that works on all browsers, including tablets and phones.Admins and developers should be excited by new features such as:New logging infrastructure allowing interesting things to be done with usage data, including analytics.Scheduled Tasks - allowing precise scheduling of tasks even on complex clustered servers. Performance improvements.Long Term Support (LTS) for security and data loss bug fixes for 3 years (until May 2017).For more details on these and more see the official Moodle 2.7 release notes, or browse our Moodle 2.7 New Features page which has pretty screenshots. You should also see our Moodle 2.7 Release Videos which take you through some of the new features in detail - we hope you enjoy them! Thanks to everyone for helping to support educators and students around the world, and cheers to you all! [Less]

by Martin Dougiamas.  Hi all!We are turning our attention again soon to doing some significant work on the Moodle Gradebook.A face-to-face Moodle Gradebook workshop is scheduled for June 11-12 in Long Beach, California where a small group of some of ... [More] the most active Gradebook developers and users are aiming to produce a draft spec for the next stage of Gradebook development, and after some further feedback from the community about it I intend to have Moodle HQ do as much of that as we can in Moodle 2.8 due in November this year.To help us at the workshop, we are collating as much information as possible from our wonderful worldwide Moodle community about what you want and need in Moodle grading.  A lot of this is already in the Moodle Tracker, in contributed code and from feedback you give to Moodle Partners.In addition we are going to be conducting two surveys, a short one first and then a longer one.   The short one is now available here.     Short Moodle Gradebook Survey (5 minutes)We'll be using the results of this survey to help us design the longer survey with more specific questions.Thank you for your contributions and please spread this to other Moodle users you know - make your voices heard and help us help you! [Less]

by Helen Foster.  Many thanks to all our Quality Assurance (QA) testers, as listed in the Testing credits, who helped us achieve a Moodle 2.7 test pass rate of 100% in only three weeks. Thanks also to all our developers, who helped with fixing bugs ... [More] identified through testing, so that tests could be reset and run again as quickly as possible. Thus we are all ready for the 2.7 release next week! Congratulations to everyone who received a Moodle tester 2014 badge for running three or more tests in the QA cycle. [Less]

by Helen Foster.  Thanks to all the students who applied to work with Moodle for Google Summer of Code 2014. As in previous years, it was very difficult deciding which project proposals to accept. Congratulations and welcome to the two students whom ... [More] we choose, who will be working on Moodle projects over the next 3-4 months: Jayesh Anandani - New question types Vignesh Panneerselvam - SCORM player and navigation For details about the projects see GSOC/2014. Please give our new Moodle developers help and encouragement wherever you can! [Less]

by Helen Foster.  We're planning on releasing Moodle 2.7 next month, and so we're once again running a Quality Assurance (QA) testing cycle. The list of over 400 tests includes lots of new tests covering features and improvements in Moodle 2.7.If you ... [More] can spare any time and would like to volunteer to help, please see the discussion Help needed with Moodle 2.7 Quality Assurance testing for details of how you can be involved.Thanks to everyone for helping ensure our new release is top quality! [Less]