Moodle Announcements

Moodle statistics

Helen Foster — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:30:14 GMT

by Helen Foster.

Have you ever wondered how many Moodle users there are worldwide? Or which versions of Moodle most people are using? Perhaps you'd like to find other Moodle sites in your country? If so, please check out our Moodle Statistics and Moodle Sites pages.

Moodle statistics are collected when administrators register their sites by following the notifications link in the site administration block then clicking the 'Moodle Registration' button.

If you registered your site some time ago, please help us improve our statistics by clicking the button again to update your registration. Please see the usage documentation for further details of how statistics are collected and maintained.

Thanks to Sam Hemelryk and Jordan Tomkinson of Moodle.com for improving our statistics maintenance procedures and for giving the Moodle Statistics and Moodle Sites pages a make-over.

Community feedback needed on development specs

Helen Foster — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:59:40 GMT

by Helen Foster.

Are either or both of the following developments planned for Moodle 2.0 of interest to you?

Course completion - for tracking whether students have completed a course according to conditions specified by the teacher
Community hubs - for enabling educators to publish their courses (for joining or downloading) to public or private communities

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:48:08 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:15:21 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 11:03:40 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 29 May 2009 14:39:35 GMT

by Helen Foster.

Moodle community get-togethers, or MoodleMoots as they are often called, are becoming more and more popular.

There were four MoodleMoots in May:

Italian MoodleMoot - Torino, Italy
Slovenian MoodleMoot - Koper, Slovenia
MoodleMoot Euskadi - Bilbao, Spain (#mooteu09)
MoodleMoot NL - Amsterdam, The Netherlands (#mootNL09)

and we have another four coming up in the next couple of months:

MoodleMoot Oklahoma - Oklahoma City, USA (#mootok09)
MoodleMoot San Francisco - San Francisco, USA (#mootsf09)
French MoodleMoot - INSA de Lyon, France
Goshen Midwest MoodleMoot - Goshen, USA (#mootin09)

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

Martin Dougiamas — Wed, 20 May 2009 13:46:57 GMT

by Martin Dougiamas.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:19:54 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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:

What you paint is what you get

Helen Foster — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:37:10 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Fri, 01 May 2009 09:13:37 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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

Helen Foster — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:02:36 GMT

by Helen Foster.

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.

Andrei Băutu - Record audio repository plugin
Jose Cedeno - Blog-style course format
Olli Savolainen - Improve Moodle user experience consistency
Mihai Sucan - What you paint is what you get
Alberto J Varela - Google Gears integration
Chris Waclawik - XML templates for administrative settings

Please help and encourage our GSOC students wherever you can!

Books about Moodle

Helen Foster — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 12:15:50 GMT

by Helen Foster.

If you're looking for a book about Moodle, please visit our Moodle Books database, which contains a variety of books and manuals, for both teachers and administrators, written by members of the Moodle community.

Recently added titles include the Moodle 1.9 Course Creator Reference Manual by Ray Lawrence and Moodle for Teaching 7-14 Year Olds by Mary Cooch. Both Ray and Mary are Particularly helpful Moodlers in our Using Moodle course.

Please note that when you buy a book from the Moodle Books database, you're helping support Moodle development, as a percentage of all sales goes to the Moodle Trust.

Proposed Moodle 1.9.5 gradebook usability improvements

Helen Foster — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 13:48:22 GMT

by Helen Foster.

Are you using the gradebook in Moodle 1.9? If so, please take a look at the list of usability improvements we're hoping to implement in 1.9.5: Gradebook improvements in Moodle 1.9.5.

As our proposed improvements involve changing the interface quite a lot, something we'd normally wait until 2.0 to do, we'd like to make sure everyone is happy with them before adding the code to the 1.9 branch. Teacher opinions would be particularly valuable.

Please see the discussion Wanted: User testing of Moodle 1.9.5 gradebook improvements in the gradebook forum for details of how you can help with testing and feedback.

Google Summer of Code 2009

Helen Foster — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:26:47 GMT

by Helen Foster.

I'm pleased to announce that Moodle will be taking part in the Google Summer of Code for our fourth year in 2009!

The GSOC program pays students to work on open source software products for 3-4 months (over the northern hemisphere summer), mentored by existing developers.

Please see Projects for new developers for our list of suggested GSOC projects and Applying to work with Moodle for GSOC for details of our application process.

Let's encourage prospective students by joining in the forum discussions about GSOC projects.

Come and meet other Moodlers in person

Helen Foster — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:07:52 GMT

by Helen Foster.

Would you like the chance to meet up with other Moodlers in person? If so, please consider attending a Moodle conference, or MoodleMoot as they are often called.

According to our calendar, we have five MoodleMoots coming up in the next couple of months:

Switzerland und German MoodleMoot - Bamberg, Bavaria, 18-20 March 2009
3rd Russian Moodle Conference - Zheleznovodsk, Russia, 1-3 April 2009
MoodleMoot Canada - Athabasca University, Canada, 1-4 April 2009
MoodleMoot UK - Loughborough University, UK, 7-8 April 2009
MoodleMoot Italia - Torino, Italy, 8-9 May 2009

See our Moodle Conference Centre for additional information on all upcoming MoodleMoots.