I’m pleased to announce Moodle 3.10! Together with the community we’ve all worked hard on this release and you can read more about it below. At the same time, we’ve also made progress towards Moodle 4.0, which is scheduled for release in November 2021. The past few months have been a busy and exciting time full of UX research, prototyping and assessing technical feasibility of the UX improvements that will be part of the 4.0 release. Because we are working on Moodle 4.0 in parallel, Moodle 3.10 and 3.11 (scheduled for release in May 2021) are considered interim releases.
Community spirit!
It’s wonderful to see the Moodle community continuing to contribute to the project, even when much of the world remains in the grips of COVID-19. Your contributions remain plenty, with Moodle 3.10 receiving over 750 commits from more than 90 developers in 19 countries!
Not only have you provided improvements and bug-fixes for Moodle LMS itself, but you also contribute with translations, documentation and QA testing. Furthermore, many of you have been actively involved in helping us shape Moodle 4.0, by participating in our UX research through workshops and test sessions. You can follow the UX research, participate in testing and have a look at the latest designs.
I want to thank you all for your ongoing commitment to being part of this open source project. I encourage you to help us continue to grow the project by getting more people involved where you can. Together we are making Moodle even better!
Dedication
First founded in 1945, this year marks the 75th anniversary of the United Nations (UN). Its 193 member states work together towards making this world a better place through taking action on issues such as peace, climate change, human rights and sustainable development. Moodle’s mission is to empower educators to improve our world by building the most efficient platform for teaching, learning and collaborating online. This is not only in line with the UN’s sustainable development goal (SDG) of quality education, but we also firmly believe that education underpins the success of the other SDGs.
Since the start of the pandemic, we’re proud Moodle is a part of the COVID-19 Global Education Coalition. Organised by UNESCO, the UN’s Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation and it is aimed at protecting the right to education during a time where over 1 billion students have been affected.
Moodle is also used by many UN and UNESCO agencies, including UNICEF, ILO (International Labour Organisation), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation) and the UN’s online examination and test platform for job candidates. For example, ITCILO, the training arm of ILO, uses Moodle for their online learning programs. ILO’s aim is to promote learning, knowledge sharing and training for governments, workers and employers towards the SDG of decent work and economic growth.
The Moodle 3.10 release is dedicated to the UN, to celebrate their 75th anniversary and recognise the contribution they are making to improve our world!
Improvements in Moodle 3.10
Let’s take a look at some of the improvements for Moodle 3.10, listed below. As always, for the full list please refer to the release notes.
- Download course content; students are now able to easily download course content. This improvement is the result of collaboration; proposed and funded by the
Moodle User Association (MUA), and developed by Moodle HQ. Currently, the download will contain the content from the File, Folder, Page and Label resources in the course. An API has been developed to
allow this functionality to be extended to the other Moodle activities and resources down the track.
- H5P improvements; a number of smaller improvements including the ability to download and replace content in the content bank, to customise the style of
H5P packages and it is now possible to save grades from embedded H5P content in the gradebook.
- Payment gateway; the introduction of a new payment system provides more flexibility and control for those who offer courses for a fee. Multiple accounts can be linked
to a PayPal payment gateway, and the payment system can be extended in the future to allow additional payment gateways.
- Quiz improvements; a number of nice quiz improvements, including a quiz timer that scrolls down the page along with the user; a new completion option based on the
number of attempts completed and the option to specify a maximum file size for essay type questions.
- LTI improvements; work has progressed on Moodle’s LTI 1.3 Advantage implementation, with the option to return multiple content items at once via deep linking
and a simplified LTI setup process that uses dynamic registration to autoconfigure LTI tools.
- Improvements for administrators; including additional command line options to upload users and restore a course from a backup file, more information about running
scheduled and ad hoc tasks to more easily manage them, and the ability to export and import your site’s local language customisations.
- Improvements for developers; including a new API for grade categories, performance improvements to the theme designer mode and a new behat step to help check pages
for compliance with the WCAG accessibility standard.
Want to know more? Check out our release videos below and our new features page, which reveal some of the other wonderful new features.
Keen to get your hands on Moodle 3.10? Go to our download page or reach out to one of our Moodle Partners who can help by providing Moodle services that complement the platform such as hosting or any further custom development. Updated versions of the Moodle App, MoodleCloud and Moodle Workplace platform will be released over the coming weeks.
Thank you all!
Sander.