Hello Moodlers and welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’.
It’s been a little while since our last publication but that doesn’t mean we’ve had a quiet few weeks here at Moodle Products.
Many of us participated in our annual MoodleMoot Global event which was held at the end of September in Barcelona. The event is organised by our team, specifically the Moodle Community team, so you can imagine how busy they have been in the last few months. If you’ve never been to a MoodleMoot and wonder what it’s like, you can take a look at this short video that conveys the feeling of the event perfectly.
Many of us were also very busy releasing Moodle LMS 4.3. Yes, it’s here!
It’s packed with new features and improvements that have been co-designed and developed by many of our community members and developers. Thank you for all that you do to support our releases, we really do mean it when we say that we couldn’t do this without you.
Here is an overview of the last steps in our release process to give you an idea of what it takes to get one of these releases out to the world.
There is no rest for the wicked (that’s us!) though and the team is now getting ready to release Moodle Workplace 4.3, upgrade MoodleCloud and update our Moodle Mobile Applications to their latest versions in the coming weeks.
We also continued our work to progress the Moodle Product Vision which sees us focus on empowering our users and delivering improvements designed to help them unlock their creativity, help facilitate cooperation and optimise learning outcomes.
In support of unlocking creativity, this last sprint saw us:
- Launch our new Moodle Product Writing Guidelines, designed to help provide clear, straightforward guidelines that will ensure our community and HQ developers can create more consistent experiences in Moodle.
- Prepare to improve the user experience for our Administrators by revamping the information architecture for our Admin Settings and other common administrative functions.
- Firm up our designs for our new Course Hierarchy layouts, due for release in 4.4.
- Prepare to launch a new feature on the Moodle Mobile App (for Android only) that makes it easier for learners to find the mobile application for their school (or wherever else they do their learning) after downloading it.
Also, if you are keen to see what our new Activity Cards, which are now available in Moodle LMS 4.3, will look like on Mobile, here they are:
To better facilitate collaboration, we progressed:
- Improvements to manager assignments in Moodle Workplace, making it easier for Moodle Workplace to integrate with a wide variety of HR systems.
- Changes to our Plugin Database, making it easier to filter and find the right plugins to support our users' needs.
And finally, to help our users optimise their teaching, training, learning and business outcomes, we worked on:
- Improving the guidance we provide on upgrading Moodle instances.
- Making managing appointments and cancellations of those appointments easier to do in Moodle Workplace.
- Reviewing our upgrade notifications in Moodle Workplace.
- Supporting better analytics in the Mobile App with a Matomo integration for our premium plans.
Until next sprint,
The Moodle Product Team