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 | Community feedback needed on development specs |
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Are either or both of the following developments planned for Moodle 2.0 of interest to you?
If so, your input on the evolving specifications would be much appreciated. For Course completion, please see the Course completion spec, then join the discussion Course Completion for 2.0. The Community hubs discussion RFC: Community hubs project for 2.0 about the Community hub spec can be found in the newly created Hub Servers forum. Thanks in advance to Jonathan Newman of Catalyst IT for developing Course completion, and to Martin D and Jerome Mouneyrac of Moodle.com for developing Community hubs. |
| Aer Lingus chooses Moodle for online pilot training |
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Schools, colleges and universities are not the only institutions deciding to use Moodle - it's becoming increasingly popular in the field of corporate education too! Ireland's national airline Aer Lingus researched a number of learning management systems for their pilot training courses, and chose Moodle based on it's features, functionality and flexibility. Moodle Partner Enovation Solutions stepped in to provide a range of commercial services for Aer Lingus, including consultancy, hosting, training, customisation and support. All Moodle Partners contribute a percentage of their earnings to the Moodle Trust, so by making use of Enovation Solutions' services, Aer Lingus has helped support Moodle development. According to Conor Rock, Training Captain at Aer Lingus, "Enovation delivered on all of our requirements, Moodle has been universally well received by the pilots and we have reduced our training costs. What can I say - the project has been a huge success!" For further details of the Aer Lingus - Moodle story, see Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere: Aer Lingus chooses Moodle for Online Pilot Training. For more stories about using Moodle, please check our Moodle stories forum. |
| New Themes Manager for Moodle |
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I'm pleased to announce that Moodle has a new Themes Manager - Patrick Malley. Patrick is a History and Psychology teacher from Granger, Indiana. He is also a particularly helpful Moodler and helps moderate the Themes forum and the Themes database. Patrick's job as Themes Manager will involve working closely with other theme developers and ensuring that lots of cool themes will be available for Moodle 2.0 and beyond. A big thank you to previous Themes Manager Urs Hunkler for all his work, particularly the CSS re-work in Moodle 1.5 and for a number of high-quality themes including Chameleon, Custom Corners and our new moodle.org theme Moodle2. |
| New Moodle language packs |
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I'm pleased to announce that two new Moodle language packs are now available - Marathi and Urdu. Marathi is spoken in south-western India and is the 15th most spoken language in the world. Urdu is one of the official languages of India and of Pakistan. There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdu. A big thank you to translators Usha Deo (Marathi) and Faisal Kaleem (Urdu), to translation coordinator Koen Roggemans, and to all our language pack maintainers listed in the Translation credits. Moodle now has a total of 81 language packs. Selected language packs may be installed on your Moodle site via the language pack install facility within Moodle, or by downloading the zip files from download.moodle.org/lang. Please see the language packs documentation for full details. |
| Moodle community get-togethers |
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Moodle community get-togethers, or MoodleMoots as they are often called, are becoming more and more popular. There were four MoodleMoots in May:
and we have another four coming up in the next couple of months:
If you're twittering about a MoodleMoot, or would like to share photos from an event, see Standard Moodle tags in Moodle Docs for the list of tags in use. Feel free to edit the page and add the tag for your event if it's not yet listed. For further information about upcoming Moodle events, please see our calendar and visit the Moodle Conference Centre. |
 | Moodle 1.9.5 and Moodle 1.8.9 are now available |
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I'm pleased to announce the latest stable releases of 1.8.x and 1.9.x are now available, as usual, from our Moodle download page. Here are the release notes with full details for Moodle 1.9.5 and Moodle 1.8.9. There are many small bug fixes and some new features in each release, but the main two things you need to know about are the gradebook interface changes in 1.9.5 and some important security issues. 1) GRADEBOOK CHANGES IN 1.9.5 We usually avoid making significant changes to the Moodle interface within a particular branch version of Moodle for very good reasons. However, there were several major problems with the gradebook in versions 1.9 to 1.9.4 that made it difficult for many teachers to use and it is these problems that 1.9.5 is trying to address. Full details of the Gradebook improvements in Moodle 1.9.5. As an admin, you have some new config options to turn things on and off, but some of the interfaces will look permanently different to how they were in 1.9.4 and before. Please make sure that your teachers are not surprised by the changes when you upgrade to 1.9.5. You may want to explicitly contact them and explain the differences. 2) SECURITY FIXES IN 1.9.5 and 1.8.9 Four serious vulnerabilities (five including the TeX bug that was already announced) have been discovered and fixed recently. (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). Full information about these vulnerabilities can be found on the security news page. If you need help with upgrading or anything else please see the Moodle support page. Cheers and thank you for using Moodle! (We are still working hard on 2.0!) |
| Moodle developers receive Global Learning Impact Awards |
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Congratulations to the following Moodle developers for receiving Global Learning Impact Awards from the IMS Global Learning Consortium. The Learning Impact Awards recognize use of technology to improve learning across all education segments and across the globe. The finalists were evaluated by an expert panel of judges and attendees at the IMS annual Learning Impact conference and Summit on Global Learning Challenges in Barcelona, Spain this week. Best Learning Platform to Repository Integration: MrCute - Moodle Repository System Congratulations to Alastair Hole, Richard Goddard, Peter Kilcoyne and Helen Brady. MrCute is an acronym for "Moodle Repository Create Upload Tag Embed" and is a Moodle module for providing access to repositories of learning materials. Best Interoperability Innovation: Moodle Simple Learning Tools for Interoperability Consumer Congratulations to Jordi Piguillem (Pigui) and Ludo (Marc Alier). The Simple LTI Module for Moodle was developed by Pigui as a GSOC 2008 project. For further details, see the video:
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| What you paint is what you get |
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Have you ever wished there was a way for students to draw or paint in Moodle? If so, you'll be pleased to hear that one of our GSOC 2009 projects is a paint tool for Moodle. The paint tool is being developed by Mihai Sucan, from Arad, Romania, and mentored by Martín Langhoff. Mihai has already developed a proof-of-concept / demo web application Paintweb which you're welcome to have a play with.
At the moment we're looking for feedback on the Paint tool specification. Please join one of the discussions in the General developer forum, gsoc: what you paint is what you get and/or Thoughts on the paint tool interface. |
| Workshop module in Moodle 2.0 |
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If you've been using Moodle for a few years, you'll most likely remember the very first contributed module, Workshop, a peer assessment activity. The Workshop module was originally written by Ray Kingdon, though it's been largely unmaintained for a long time except for emergency fixes by various developers to keep it operational. The good news is that the Workshop module is being completely rewritten for Moodle 2.0 by David Mudrák. We'd really like feedback on the Workshop 2.0 specification before David starts coding. Please join our discussion in the Workshop module forum, Workshop 2.0 specification - request for review and comments. |
| Welcome to our GSOC 2009 students |
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Thanks to all the students who applied to work with Moodle for Google Summer of Code 2009. The quality of applications was much higher than in previous years, so it was a tough job for our mentors deciding which project proposals to accept. Congratulations and welcome to the following six students who will be working on Moodle projects over the next 3-4 months.
Please help and encourage our GSOC students wherever you can! |
