Dear all,
It’s hard to believe it has already been 6 months since the release of Moodle 3.7. Time has flown as we’ve worked together with the wider Moodle community on the new release. And I’m proud to say that today we are releasing Moodle 3.8!
This release introduces many exciting new features and improvements, but before I highlight these I want to reflect on a very important group within our Moodle community; our volunteer translators.
Moodle translations and 3.8 dedication
Did you know that Moodle is being translated in over 130 different languages (not counting dialects)? They are all in various levels of completeness, and usually start with the most-commonly used areas in Moodle, but at least 30 languages have more than 80% coverage. At the time of writing this, a mind-boggling number of more than 1.7 million language strings have been translated by the community. You can see the list of amazing translators on our credits page. Helped by your efforts Moodle is used in every country in the world!
We are very grateful for all the time and effort volunteered by so many people around the world. You are all contributing to our mission of empowering educators! In terms of translations, no one has put in greater effort than Koen Roggemans. Koen has been our official Moodle translation coordinator since 2004 and has tirelessly worked on the Dutch translation, coordinating and helping other translation efforts, all whilst skillfully collaborating with all stakeholders. Koen, as thank you for your wonderful contribution to the Moodle platform and global community, we are dedicating this release to you!
For anyone who wants to help translating Moodle into their language, please have a look at our translation guide.
Moodle 3.8: New features
Packed with many improvements and new features, here are the key highlights for Moodle 3.8:
- H5P; in collaboration with Joubel, the creators of H5P, Moodle 3.8 sees the first phase of our H5P integration come to fruition. You can now upload H5P activities from the Atto editor and we’ve introduced a new filter that will automatically recognise H5P URLs from trusted sites. The H5P content can be displayed from within Moodle without requiring any additional plugins. We will continue to build on this integration for our next release as we work towards bringing creation of graded H5P activities into the Moodle platform. Until then, you are able to use the existing H5P plugin for creation of H5P content, or create your content at H5P.org and upload it to your Moodle site!
- Forum improvements; a continuation of our collaborative effort with the Moodle User Association that started for Moodle 3.7. We are now introducing a range of new features that make Moodle Forums
substantially more powerful. Teachers are now able to grade their students’ forum contributions with the introduction of the forum grader functionality. Student activity can be reviewed with the new forum summary report and forum content can be
exported for further analysis. We have also introduced a new user preference where you can select to use a new design for the nested discussion view. Try it out and let us know what you think!
- Improvements to learning analytics; Moodle 3.8 introduces new models to help identify students who haven’t logged into the course yet, or students who haven’t logged in for some time. Helping teachers identify students who could benefit from
being reached out to. It is now also possible to apply bulk actions to insights. A new insight results report provides a summary of the insights that were generated and how they were used and it is now also possible to run the machine learning
algorithms from a separate server to reduce load on the main Moodle server. Do you want to know more about Moodle Learning Analytics or share your experiences and results? Please join our Learning Analytics Working Group!
- New emojis! Enjoy improved communication through Moodle by benefiting from a full range of emojis, exactly like you use on your phone. These can be browsed and used within Moodle Messaging as well as from the Atto text editor.
- Course overview; system administrators now have the ability to configure which layout options are available to the user (card, list, summary). It is now also possible to create your own course filter options using a custom course field. This
means you can create filters for learning programs, lecture terms or anything that you easily want to make available to your teachers and students. Thanks to a number of people working together, including Alexander Bias from Ulm University
and our Moodle Partners.
- Question bank: question IDs and tags are now shown next to the question name, making it easier to manage and organise your questions. Thanks to Mahmoud Kassaei and Tim Hunt from Open University.
- Back-up: it is now possible to exclude files from the back up making it much quicker when doing a backup followed immediately by a restore. The order in which courses are backed up is also improved ensuring that those new and most recently
modified courses are prioritised.
- Assignment grading: uploaded images are now automatically rotated saving you time while grading.
The backup and assignment grading improvements are thanks to work done by Matt Porritt, Brendan Heywood, Dmitrii Metelkin, Nathan Nguyen and Mark Nelson on behalf of a Moodle Partner, Catalyst.
There are many more improvements and I can’t mention them all, so please have a look at the overview video below and our new features page. For more details the release notes page is a good start.
This release is once again showcasing the power of open source, with over 1300 commits from around 100 contributors in over 16 countries it truly is a global effort. A big thank you to our community who have contributed with improvements, bug-fixes, translation, documentation, QA testing, providing their valuable feedback and so much more!
You can download Moodle 3.8 from our download page or please reach out to one of our Moodle Partners. We will be releasing updated versions of the Moodle App and MoodleCloud platform for Moodle 3.8 over the next few weeks.
Thank you all,
Sander.