Martin Dougiamas

Hi,

The FRONTEND team at Moodle HQ are working on a number of new things to do with usability and features for Moodle 2.7 and beyond.

To improve our development process and decision-making, we are focussing on producing quick usable prototypes of ideas early in the 6-month development cycle, before getting deep into proper coding.

To facilitate this we have a new site called prototype.moodle.net where we'll be publishing experiments and examples for you to try out and to give us feedback on.  The site will be evolving over time with new projects and mockups.  Also note that it's not comprehensive and doesn't include everything we are working on.

If you have some time, please explore the Moodle sites there and try out the new features, then give us feedback using the surveys or other methods provided.

Thanks for helping to improve Moodle!

Cheers,
Martin

This sounds like a really interesting suggestion, Bob.  Do we have a tracker issue or another discussion yet where that is being fleshed out?

I just moved this to the Gradebook forum too.

I'd like to point out that there is no guarantee that any of the Netspot-developed enhancements will actually get into 2.7, but that they do all seem like pretty good small enhancements that should not be difficult to integrate.

Likewise there is some great enhancements in the LSU work, thanks Robert for working on documentation so everyone can "see" it better.

Moodle HQ is currently tackling a number of gradebook bugs too in a sprint focussed on gradebook and assignment bugs highlighted by Moodlerooms.  (listed here)

The problem with our gradebook is much bigger than these fringe issues however.

1. We have a fundamental conflict produced by two major ways of grading around the world: points and percentages.  A lot of the issues we have are produced by trying to support both at the same time.   Most people interested in gradebook only work in one of the other.  Petr Skoda has suggested separating them completely and I'm coming around to that idea.
   
   
2. The interaction of gradebook with activities really needs an overhaul.  For consistency and simplicity it would be good if the central grading code provided and controlled all the interfaces for grading.
   
   
3. The whole concept of assessment in Moodle (and in education in general) needs to be clarified so that we have a very clear model that pervades the entire system.  For example how should outcomes and grades be connected?   I think a lot of research needs to be done in this area.

All this adds up to a lot of work and I'd really like us to tackle this as a mega-project next year.   Robert's phase 3 above is a start in the right direction but there's a lot of work to do yet.

I totally agree.  The only thing we are saying is that we will not be testing things on old browsers, not that we are purposefully breaking anything.  I imagine the degradation will be quite gradual for anyone stuck on an old browser for whatever reason. 

But discussion continues here:  MDL-41973

I doubt 2.6 will be an official LTS from us.  There are still many important things like analytics and mobile support which are being developed at this stage.   2.7 could be If development goes well.

Note that there is nothing stopping the community from volunteering to support 2.6 for as long as they like (back porting security issues etc) but there is simply no incentive for us to aid in keeping people there at the moment.   We just want you to have the best functionality, the best usability and the best accessibility.