Moodle Announcements

Canberra Institute of Technology chooses Moodle

Helen Foster — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:17:57 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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".

Moodle Partner offers Moodle integrations

Helen Foster — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:59:10 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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 are now available

Martin Dougiamas — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 06:22:08 GMT

by Martin Dougiamas.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:55:00 GMT

by Helen Foster.

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle 1.9.5 has been certified SCORM 1.2 compliant! See tracker issue MDL-19706 for details. A big thank you to Piers Harding and Dan Marsden for helping with the final push on making our SCORM module 100% compliant.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:30:41 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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!

New course format: Timeline

Helen Foster — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:31:24 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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.

More chances to meet other Moodlers

Helen Foster — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:09:27 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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:

Moodle-Konferenz Elmshorn - Elmshorn, Germany, 18 September 2009 (#mootDE09)
MoodleMoot Austria - TU Vienna, Austria, 24-25 September 2009 (#mootat09)
MoodleMoot Colombia - Bogotá D.C. Columbia, 8-9 October 2009 (#mootco09)
Orlando MoodleMoot - Orlando, USA, 28-30 October 2009
MoodleMoot Madrid - Spain, 29-31 October 2009
MoodleMoot Chile - Valparaíso, V Región, Chile, 6-7 November 2009 (#mootcl09)
MoodleMoot Brasil - São Paulo, Brazil, 13-14 November 2009

Looking further ahead, the following events have been added to next year's calendar so far:

iMoot - the first web-based international Moot, 7-10 January 2010 (#imoot)
MoodleMoot Japan - Hakodate City, Japan, 13-14 February 2010 (#mootJP10hk)
MoodleMoot Berlin - Berlin, Germany, 25-26 March 2010 (#mootDE10b)
MoodleMoot NZ10 - Christchurch, New Zealand, 13-15 April 2010 (#mootNZ10)

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)

University of Strathclyde to migrate to Moodle

Helen Foster — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:16:13 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:32:34 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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!

Italian Moodle Partner MediaTouch 2000 srl has supported Moodle at La Sapienza by providing a range of commercial services including system design and capacity planning, set-up, load balancing, backup and consultancy. Moodle Partners contribute a percentage of their earnings to the Moodle Trust, so by making use of the services of MediaTouch 2000 srl, La Sapienza has helped support Moodle development.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:24:23 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:45:35 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:50:31 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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:

Flexible block system design and development for 2.0
Theme engine 2.0 design and development
Navigation 2.0 design and development
Roles administration improvements
JavaScript improvements
Quiz module and question bank maintenance
Improvements to filters and many other things
Almost 400 bug fixes!

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.

Congrats to Penny Leach: Best Education Hacker!

Martin Dougiamas — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:12:31 GMT

by Martin Dougiamas.

Congratulations to all five winners of the Google O'Reilly Open Source Awards for 2009, but especially to "our" Penny Leach for her "Best Education Hacker" award!

All Moodle developers know she deserves it, and the fact that she has also been so central in the development of Mahara (an excellent e-portfolio and social networking system that integrates very well with Moodle) just makes her even more deserving.

Good on ya Penny! Here's something from us as well.

Microsoft Live Services Plugin for Moodle

Martin Dougiamas — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:13:04 GMT

by Martin Dougiamas.

We don't normally announce new Moodle modules here but this one is notable because it's one of the first GPLv2 software releases ever from Microsoft, so we're honoured!

http://www.educationlabs.com/projects/moodleproduct/

Their code (actually a block and an auth plugin) implements a nice integration with Microsoft Live services (allowing users to log in using their Live ID, as well as see and create emails and calendar events from within Moodle). Here's a video about it.

Since (from a programming point of view) Live has the same APIs as any Exchange server, I think a lot of Moodlers will be using this code to integrate Moodle closely with their private Exchange servers as well.

You can find out more about the code here in this blog post from L. Michael Golden.

GSOC 2009 projects update

Helen Foster — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 10:55:46 GMT

by Helen Foster.

Our Google Summer of Code 2009 students are now just over half way through their projects and are making great progress!

Andrei Băutu has developed a Riffly integration repository plugin for recording audio and video content. The content is stored on the riffly.com servers and requires no streaming software or storage space in Moodle. For further details see the record audio repository plugin spec and tracker issue MDL-18341.

Jose Cedeno has named his new course format 'Timeline'. This course format enables teachers to easily add new course sections to the top of the course page. A demo is now available - see the discussion Timeline Course Format - please help with testing! and tracker issue CONTRIB-1403.

Olli Savolainen, our usability specialist, has a tracker meta-issue MDL-19586 for his project Moodle UI consistency improvements. These days Olli is often to be found in the Using Moodle forums giving valuable advice on usability issues.

Mihai Sucan has begun work on integrating his paint tool into Moodle (MDL-18651). See the discussion PaintWeb demo - please test if you fancy having a play with the paint tool.

Alberto J Varela has created his first patch (MDL-19286) as part of his Google Gears integration. Offline mode will allow students without an Internet connection to access activities in Moodle, then synchronize their work when they are next online. For further details, see Alberto's blog Moodle GSoC 2009.

A big thank you to all our GSOC students and their mentors for their Moodle development work. Please help and encourage our students by providing comments and feedback about their projects. See GSOC/2009 for links to discussions, tracker issues and developer blogs.