A big thank you to everyone who entered our recent Cool Course Competition. All 50 entries are currently available as courses on the Cool Course Competition site.

Your help is now needed in judging the competition. Please check out the courses then vote for the winner in each category by participating in the choice activities on the Cool Course Competition site. Competition judging will end on Friday 19 February 2010 and prizewinners will be announced soon afterwards.

The aim of the Cool Course Competition was to encourage people to donate courses for our Moodle demonstration site and for the moodle.org community hub in Moodle 2.0. All courses are published under one of the Creative Commons licenses and are available for anyone to download and use.

(Edited by Helen Foster to add the date when competition judging ends - original submission Monday, 1 February 2010, 04:09 PM)

As you all know, moodle.org aims to be a friendly and welcoming place where people can get help with and learn about Moodle, and contribute to making Moodle even better. In the interests of maintaining a productive learning environment and for the benefit of newcomers (several hundred each day according to the Moodle statistics), we now have a Moodle.org forums Code of Conduct.

Thanks to everyone who helped writing our code of conduct and the accompanying Moodle.org forums help. A big thank you also to all our moderators and course facilitators for their continuing work.

Leeds City College has recently announced that it will be using Moodle as the new cross-college Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) following the merger of three local colleges.

With approximately 60,000 students, Leeds City College is one of the largest Further Eduction Colleges in the United Kingdom. E-learning at the college will be driven forward with a large-scale and heavily customised Moodle installation that will provide 24/7 online learning for all course areas.

According to Lewis Carr, VLE Manager at Leeds City College, "Moodle has already proved itself as an enterprise class VLE but its modular design and flexibility allows us to seamlessly integrate it with other college systems and provide greater interoperability. We are hoping to raise the bar and show the education sector just what is possible with Moodle."

Further details about the college's decision can be found in the press release Leeds City College Chooses Moodle.

It's been a year since moodle.org was given a new look, and with the help of our wonderful translators, we're now internationalizing the site! The top level pages and menus on moodle.org are available in German, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Japanese, Italian, Danish and even Asturian, with many more languages to follow.

Thanks to Xosé Nel Caldevilla Vega for the latest Moodle language pack, Asturian. Asturian is spoken in Spain and Portugal and has between 300 and 450 thousand native speakers.

If you're interested in creating a new Moodle language pack, please see the translation documentation. If you'd like to help improve an existing language pack, please contact your language pack maintainer.

Have you any cool Moodle courses which nicely illustrate how Moodle features can be used? If so, how about entering them in the Cool Course Competition!

The Cool Course Competition is being held to encourage people to donate courses for our Moodle demonstration site and for the moodle.org community hub in Moodle 2.0.

The competition opens on Monday 19th October and will run for three months. There are various competition categories and some great prizes on offer!

For full details of the competition, including information on how to enter, please visit the Cool Course Competition site. Good luck with your competition entries!

(Edited by Helen Foster to change competition duration from two to three months - original submission Friday, 16 October 2009, 05:30 PM)

Moodle 1.9.7 and Moodle 1.8.11 were recently released. Apart from a range of bug fixes and small improvements, ten security vulnerabilities (2 critical, 6 major and 2 minor) have been discovered and fixed since Moodle 1.9.6. (Thanks as usual to the reporters and to all the guys responsible for fixing these serious issues).

WE RECOMMEND ALL MOODLE SITES UPGRADE THEIR SITES TO ONE OF THESE VERSIONS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

As per our usual procedure, all 45,000 admins of registered Moodle sites were already privately notified over a week ago.

More details can be found in the Moodle 1.9.7 release notes and the Moodle 1.8.11 release notes. Please read these closely as there may be some changes that affect how you use Moodle.

The releases themselves are available, as always, from our downloads page or any of our CVS mirrors.

Cheers,
Martin

If you're looking for a book or manual about Moodle, please visit our Moodle Books database.

Recently added titles include Moodle 1.9 Multimedia by João Fernandes, Moodle 1.9 for Second Language Teaching by Jeff Stanford and Moodle 1.9 Math by Ian Wild.

When you buy a book from the Moodle Books database, you help support Moodle development, as a percentage of all sales goes to the Moodle Trust.

Moodle manuals in many languages are also available for download from Moodle manuals.

The Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) in Australia has selected Moodle Partner NetSpot to provide support for the introduction of the institute's new integrated e-learning solution "eLearn", based on Moodle, content repository EQUELLA and the Wimba Collaboration Suite.

As lead contractor, NetSpot will be providing a wide range of services to CIT, including implementation consulting, training, systems integration, load testing, Moodle configuration and customisation.

All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding or expertise, so by making use of NetSpot's services, CIT is helping support Moodle development.

According to Allan Christie, Founder and Managing Director of NetSpot, "CIT's choice of the best-of-breed open source learning management system (Moodle) combined with leading proprietary systems (Wimba and EQUELLA) adds value to the core LMS offering".

Many of our Moodle Partners specialize in providing Moodle integrations, including American company Remote-Learner who are offering an Enterprise Learning Intelligence Suite for Moodle (ELIS™).

ELIS, an integration of several open source solutions with Moodle, comprises a curriculum management system, the Business Intelligence software Jaspersoft and the Content Management System Alfresco. For further details, see Remote-Learner Announces Enterprise Learning Intelligence Suite for Moodle.

Remote-Learner have also been involved in integrating the Open Source Video Platform Kaltura with Moodle as both a new resource and assignment type, enabling teachers and students to easily add and edit videos from within Moodle. For further information, see Remote-Learner and Kaltura Announce Partnership to Bring Open Source Video to Moodle.

If you're looking to integrate an external system with Moodle, please consider making use of your local Moodle Partner. All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding or expertise, so by making use of their services you are also helping support Moodle development.

Moodle 1.9.6 and Moodle 1.8.10 were recently released. Apart from a range of bug fixes and small improvements, six security vulnerabilities (1 critical, 1 major and 4 minor) have been discovered and fixed since Moodle 1.9.5. (Thanks as usual to the reporters and to Petr Skoda for his tireless and excellent work defending all our Moodle sites).

There are no reported exploits yet, and they do not affect all sites, but we still recommend that you upgrade your sites to these latest versions as soon as possible (or otherwise ensure that these issues are not active in your site). As per our usual procedure, all 45,000 admins of registered Moodle sites were already privately notified a week ago.

More details can be found in the Moodle 1.9.6 release notes and the Moodle 1.8.10 release notes.

The releases themselves are available, as always, from our downloads page or any of our CVS mirrors.

Cheers,
Martin