Team Moodle has been incredibly busy for the past few months bringing together another major release of Moodle.
Moodle 3.1 wraps a lot of new features together with hundreds of fixes and improvements into a package that we'll be supporting for the next three years, 1.5 years longer than most releases.
I am proud to announce that the most important new feature in this release is the new core support for competencies, which is something we've been talking about and developing in the community for many years. These help when Moodle is used for competency-based education (CBE), "mastery learning" and any technique that involves learning plans based on the things students know, and the things they are yet to know.
Our HQ developers (in collaboration with the community and significant contributions of development and design from the Université de Montréal) have now added strong basic interfaces for these in core, allowing competencies to be determined automatically via coursework or manually by examination of uploaded evidence. However we fully expect these core interfaces to be further extended by the community via plugins and integrations to suit all the many niches where Moodle is used.
This release also marks the first time a new feature has been chosen by the Moodle Users Association. In this case it was the Recycle Bin, a plugin written by Skylar Kelty at the University of Kent, now reviewed and included as a standard feature in Moodle 3.1.
These are just a couple of highlights from a long list of new features. Our videos below explain more.
For full details, see the Moodle 3.1 release notes, or just download Moodle now and get started!
If you're upgrading pay special attention to the upgrading information. Of course, you don't need to worry about this if you're one of the 18,693 sites using MoodleCloud - you'll find that your site has been magically upgraded already today!
As always a very special thank you to everyone in the community who've helped us put this release together, 121 developers from 23 countries including Moodle HQ, Moodle Partners, QA testers, documenters and everyone else. Hugs all round!
Watch this space for a co-announcement from Juan about the new Moodle Mobile 3.1 release, which is designed to work well with Moodle 3.1 (and earlier versions too).
And now for us it's onwards and upwards to Moodle 3.2 in November, with some exciting things planned!
Cheers,
Martin Dougiamas, Founder and CEO of Moodle Pty Ltd
(Edited by Marina Glancy - original submission Monday, May 23, 2016, 6:53 PM)