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 | Moodle 1.9.6 and Moodle 1.8.10 are now available |
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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 |
 | Moodle 1.9.5 is certified SCORM 1.2 compliant |
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If you are interested in seeing the Moodle SCORM module becoming certified for SCORM 2004 features, see MDL-7068 and contact the Moodle.com helpdesk if you can offer funding. If you have any questions about the SCORM module, please check our SCORM FAQ and the SCORM module forum. |
| Cool Course Competition |
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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 two 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! |
| More chances to meet other Moodlers |
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If you've not yet had chance to attend a Moodle community get-together, or MoodleMoot as they are often called, there are several coming up in the next few months:
Looking further ahead, the following events have been added to next year's calendar so far:
For further information about upcoming Moodle events, please visit the Moodle Conference Centre. (Edited by Helen Foster to add additional dates - original submission Tuesday, 15 September 2009, 01:42 PM) |
| New course format: Timeline |
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Do you have any courses with lots of sections which result in the course page being really long? If so, you'll be interested in the Timeline course format, which displays only the most recent sections on the course page, with older sections available on a separate page. The Timeline course format, a GSOC 2009 project, has been developed by José Cedeño and mentored by Martín Langhoff. All being well, the code is due to be merged into the OLPC XS Moodle. If you'd like to have a play with the Timeline course format, please visit the Timeline course format test course (login with username test and password test). Any bugs can be reported in tracker issue CONTRIB-1403 and feedback can be posted in the discussion Timeline Course Format - please help with testing! If you're interested in trying out other course formats, the Modules and Plugins database has over ten contributed course formats available for download. Discussions about them can be found in the course formats forum. |
| University of Strathclyde to migrate to Moodle |
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It seems that an increasing number of institutions are making the decision to migrate from their existing Course Management System or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) to Moodle. The University of Strathclyde in the UK, with 29,000 students, is the latest institution to announce their decision. According to Howard Ramsay, VLE Project Leader, "The University of Strathclyde University Management Committee considered the recommendations from the University’s Learning with Technologies Implementation Group and approved development of a Unified Virtual Learning Environment. Core to this will be the implementation of Moodle as the technical foundation for the Unified System. Full details can be found on the University’s website at http://www.strath.ac.uk/learningtechnologyreview/outcomes." Further information about migrating to Moodle from other systems may be found in Moodle Docs - Migration. |
| Moodle success at Sapienza University of Rome |
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Sapienza University of Rome, or Università di Roma "La Sapienza", is one of the largest universities in Europe, with over 147,000 students and 24 faculties. In 2004, La Sapienza researched a number of virtual learning environments before deciding to implement Moodle as an experimental initiative. Five years on, fuelled by the interest of students and word-of-mouth amongst professors, the university's Moodle site e-learning a "La Sapienza" con MOODLE has grown to over 50,000 users and around 1,000 courses! In addition, La Sapienza has contributed to improving Moodle accessibility to ensure that Moodle complies with strict Italian accessibility legislation (see Moodle Tracker issue MDL-7860). According to Professor Paolo Renzi, who led the experimental initiative in 2004, "We are really pleased with Moodle. It demonstrates a strong pedagogical background as well as sound architecture, both of which are critical for wide acceptance and scalability. The smooth Moodle learning curve has also been very important in enabling teachers and students to get started and participate in courses quickly." |
| Moodle Partner network continues to grow |
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I'm pleased to announce that our Moodle Partner network now has over fifty companies around the world. Recent additions include companies in Brazil, the Czech Republic and Canada. The Moodle Partners are authorised service companies committed to financially supporting the open source Moodle project. They provide a range of optional commercial services for Moodle users around the world. All Moodle Partners contribute directly to the ongoing development of Moodle software via funding or expertise. If you have a need for Moodle services such as hosting, support, installation, training, custom coding, course development or consulting, please support Moodle development by making use of your local Moodle Partner. For further information on the Moodle Partner programme, please see Moodle Partners - moodle.com. |
| Audio and video recording in Moodle 2.0 |
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Would you like to be able to record audio and video in Moodle? If so, you'll be interested in a couple of new repository plugins, Riffly and Nanogong, for Moodle 2.0. The Record audio repository plugin, a GSOC 2009 project, has been developed by Andrei Băutu and mentored by Jerome Mouneyrac. You can read an account of Andrei's experience in his blog Nothing fancy, Just blogging. As always, help in testing is much appreciated. You're welcome to try recording some audio and video in the audio and video test course (login with username test and password test). Alternatively, you can download the Riffly and Nanogong repository plugin from the Modules and Plugins database. Please report any bugs in tracker issue MDL-18341 and join the discussion Record audio repository plugin to give comments and feedback. |
| Thanks to great all-rounder Tim Hunt |
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A big thank you to Tim Hunt for his outstanding contribution to Moodle whilst working at Moodle HQ in Perth.
In the past twelve months, Tim's work has included:
In addition to contributing tons of code, Tim has been a particularly helpful Moodler in the Using Moodle forums, a mentor for the GSOC 2009 project Moodle UI consistency improvements, and has made lots of valuable contributions to our developer documentation. Tim has even found the time to blog. (His post The geeks don't really matter is recommended reading!) It's difficult to convey how much Tim has achieved in the past year, as he's such a great all-rounder. We look forward to continuing to benefit from Tim's contributions to Moodle when he returns to his permanent job in the UK as a developer at The Open University. |
