Hello!
I’m so happy to announce that Moodle 3.2 is now available for downloading!
This new release is another big step forward for our open-source project. I’m proud of how our whole community, including Moodle institutions, Moodle Partners, hundreds of developers and Moodle users everywhere have again come together through the core work at Moodle HQ to support our shared mission to provide the best learning management platform on the planet.
There are many highlights from the past six month’s work, but in general we’ve focussed on user experience and accessibility.
Firstly, I'm thrilled to introduce Boost, a new core base theme for Moodle (based on Bootstrap 4) which marks a new direction for how Moodle looks and functions. The changes are not too radical, so long-time Moodle users will learn it quickly, but they give Moodle sites a fresh, new structure that aligns with many websites and mobile apps that you might be familiar with and that we hope new users to Moodle will find easier to learn. With that comes better navigation, configuration and more space on your screen for important course content. Of course, if you prefer your old themes they continue to work as before. However I really recommend that themers build on Boost, and everyone join in our user testing projects, to help us refine and strengthen this UX direction further in releases to come.
We've also designed some great improvements to messaging and notifications, sponsored by our good friends at University of Minnesota (special thanks to Mark McKay for his passion), that make it easier to keep in touch with your course and fellow participants, no matter what device you are using.
When you start up a fresh copy of Moodle you will notice a new user tours feature, sponsored by Dublin City University, that will show you around the new Boost interface. These tours are easy to create for any page in your site, and can help with on-boarding of new changes or even making general announcements.
Other major features include an industry-leading embedded media player based on video.js, which includes full support for video captions and subtitles, as well as new plugin-based support for other media players; slick new interactive report graphics; LTI 2 compliance and heaps more. Altogether there are about 623 improvements and bug fixes. Our videos explain more:
Please read Moodle 3.2 New Features for more about the major features, or see the Moodle 3.2 Release Notes for a full description of all the details including information for Moodle developers and designers. I see a lot of developers have already upgraded their plugins for Moodle 3.2!
You can get Moodle directly from the usual primary channels: our download site or via git. All sites on MoodleCloud, our community Moodle hosting platform, will be upgraded to Moodle 3.2 soon (expected on December 12th). If you are hosted by one of our global Moodle Partners, please speak with them about your upgrade timetable.
Also next week look out for the new 3.2 version of Moodle Mobile, our companion mobile app for iOS and Android. For those institutions with a custom Branded Moodle Mobile App - all of your apps will also be automatically upgraded soon afterwards.
Thanks again to everyone involved in using and creating the Moodle project, you are a lovely bunch of people to hang out with and an example to the world of how doing software the open way is the right way.
Please always feel free to join us and help to continually improve our Free educational tools, either through the open public forums and tracker, or by joining the Moodle Users Association (we have started work on an exciting new dashboard sponsored by MUA for Moodle 3.3!).
Love to all and I hope your 2016 wraps up well!
Martin Dougiamas
Moodle Founder and CEO of Moodle Pty Ltd.