Moodle Community news

For more than 20 years, our community has trusted Moodle to deliver innovative, outcome-focused learning tools.  This latest release continues our ongoing journey of empowering our users, with improvements designed to help them unlock their creativity, help facilitate cooperation and optimise learning outcomes.

Community collaboration

The Moodle LMS 4.3 release contains more than 470 bug fixes, improvements and new features which the Moodle LMS teams and our community developers have been working on over the last 6 months. Our community contributed 216 issue to this release, these included 133 Bug fixes, 67 Improvements and 3 major features

In addition, you have helped us by running QA tests, providing translations and writing documentation. 

Thank you for your efforts in supporting and improving Moodle, as an open source project, we couldn’t do this without you!

Please see below a summary of the key feature improvements:

Boosted security features

Security has been a focus in this release, with the addition of multi-factor authentication added to core, “do not track” for YouTube and Vimeo utilised by default, as well as a number of important security fixes and improvements.  This continued focus on the security of the Moodle platform is increasingly important for the safety and security of institutions and students world wide. These improvements will help administrators easily implement best practices by default.

Caption: Only displaying  tokens on creation ensures a safe, secure, and compliant learning environment. 

Sleeker and streamlined Activity Cards

Activity cards are now more intuitive, allowing seamless management of groups, restrictions, and activity completion conditions directly from the course screen.  In response to feedback from our users, the activity cards themselves are now also more compact and streamlined to use less vertical space, significantly reducing scrolling in course pages.

By reducing navigation obstacles, these improvements will help reduce the time and effort it takes for course creators to manage course activities and reduce scroll length within courses, making navigation easier for learners.

Caption: The refreshed activity cards are streamlined making it easier for educators to manage groups, restrictions and activity completion conditions.

Time-saving default site-level settings for activity completion

Courtesy of the Moodle Users Association's valuable input, administrators and educators can now set default activity completion conditions at the site level. This improvement results in reduced management effort, increase accuracy, and speedy activity creation for instructors. 

Caption: Educators can now save time by choosing the default site-level settings for activity completion.

Increase adoption of external tools with LTI improvements

The instructor experience has been significantly improved when configuring and using course level LTI tools. The improved functionality includes the ability to add and manage pre-configured tools at a course level from a dedicated page, reduced complexity of the forms using progressive disclosure, and a streamlined experience when adding an external tool activity.   

A contribution from the community also enables LTI tools configured at a system level to be restricted to only be available to specific categories further enhancing the flexibility of LTI External tools.  

Caption: Educators can now edit and manage the pre-configured LTI tools at a course level. 

Question bank improvements

Thanks to contributions from the Open University, ETH Zurich and Bern UAS with backing from other European universities, and developed by Catalyst EU, these improvements allow educators to have enhanced search and filter options and customise their view of the question bank, making assessment creation and management a seamless experience. This is just the start of a wider piece of work being undertaken by this community team.

Caption: Educators can now easily search and filter questions in the question bank.

More reports directly within Moodle 

As a continuation of the implementation of Report Builder the next set of reports have been migrated to use this new functionality.  The added flexibility allows for creating more in-depth reports directly within Moodle, reducing the need for external tools. This results in easier maintenance and a more user-friendly experience.

Upgraded TinyMCE editor for improved content creation

With TinyMCE becoming the default editor in the previous Moodle release the focus has been to improve the experience for all users.  Moodle LMS 4.3 enhances the TinyMCE text editor with a user-friendly interface, improvements to the HTML editor with code colouring in the markup, and support for TinyMCE premium plugins allowing its capabilities to be expanded easily.

Improved navigation and Course index

Now, it is possible to expand all/collapse the course index on the course page.  Additionally floating previous and next buttons have been added to Book activities eliminating the need to scroll to navigate in Books. These improvements make the navigation of large courses effortless, so that learners and educators can focus more on content and activities, enhancing learner experience and engagement.

Enhanced grading experience

The improvements continue to come to the Gradebook. Improvements have been made to the searching across multiple grade reports to align their behaviours and significantly improve their performance on large courses.  The Gradebook setup page has had significant enhancements including the addition of a sticky footer for common actions.

Streamlined content sharing with MoodleNet

Educators can now share course content through a direct MoodleNet integration, allowing educators to easily share their course content and allowing others to discover their top-tier educational resources. 

Caption: Sharing courses to MoodleNet is quick and easy at the tip of a button. 

Enhance collaboration with in-course messaging 

Moodle is renowned for fostering collaborative learning through group activities such as Forums, Wikis, and live virtual classrooms. 

The launch of our new experimental integration with the Matrix Messaging system provides access to a contemporary messaging interface directly in the heart of Moodle courses.  This additional functionality lays the groundwork for integrating other messaging systems (e.g. Slack or Teams) more seamless in future. These new in-course communication options will help educators and learners stay connected, foster increased engagement and work more closely together!

Caption: Launching the in-course communication options helps educators and learners stay connected

Find out more about Moodle LMS 4.3 and watch our short videos below on Activity Card redesign, Site-level completion default settings, LTI External tools, MoodleNet share courses, Course communication and Report Builder enhancements. Read our Moodle LMS 4.3 new features documentation for an overview of the key features and improvements.

We are really excited to see all this hard work out into the world for everyone to benefit from.  

Thanks,

Brett Dalton 

Head of Educational Services