We invite you to join us for our upcoming Moodle Academy webinar “Design Thinking process: How to Empathise with users and Define the problem” on Thursday 14th December at 9:30-10:30 UTC, which is free to attend.

In this webinar you will learn the importance of focusing on the users and the problems they face during the UX Design Thinking process. The webinar will be delivered by UX and Product Experience experts from Moodle HQ.

We will provide an overview of the 5 phases of the Design Thinking process, with a focus on the first two stages Empathise and Define. 

We will use a case study from recent Moodle core development (the Activity Cards redesign) to explain some of the tools used at Moodle HQ and show the results of the work, including the final designs, compared to the original user interface.

This webinar is based on a workshop that the UX team at Moodle HQ shared with attendees of the UX Jam at MoodleMoot Global 2023 in Barcelona.

This webinar is part of the course ‘Moodle Academy webinars’. You have to be enrolled in the course to join the webinar.

Register at Moodle Academy.

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’. Since our last update, we have completed both our planning sprint and the first sprint of the last increment of the year… where does the time go?!

This sprint saw the team complete the release of Moodle Workplace 4.3. In case you missed the release announcement, I am relinking it here, it really is worth a read!

Our team also released the 4.3 versions of our Mobile Applications for both Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace and upgraded our MoodleCloud plans for all new customers to the latest version of Moodle LMS. 

If your organisation hasn’t recently upgraded your Moodle implementation, please consider doing so. The new functionality and improved user experience in the most recent version of our products are truly game-changing!

All our teams are now focused on the next steps of delivering our Moodle Product Vision which sees us empowering our users and delivering improvements designed to help them unlock their creativity, help facilitate collaboration and optimise their business & learning outcomes.

We are empowering course creators to unlock their creativity by improving the experience and functionality offered in:

• Assignment Management: We kicked off work that will see us enhance the experience offered via our Assignment activity. To make sure we get this right, we are spending time focused on understanding users' current pain points, market trends and the technical modernisation opportunities. 
• Course Design: We progressed with the delivery of our new course hierarchy functionality which will enhance the flexibility of course formatting. 
• Activity Management: We ideated on new options to engage with our activity chooser when creating courses to enhance the functionality it offers and make it easier to use. 

We are empowering better collaboration between community members and with Moodle HQ through:

• Moodle.org & our Plugin Directory Ongoing Enhancements: The home of our community improves every sprint!
• New Moodle Development Funding Options: If you are keen to contribute to the development of the Moodle ecosystem in a different way, we’ve got one coming soon with the launch of our new Community Funding Platform! Find out more by watching the video. 

We are empowering administrators and developers to optimise their business outcomes by modernising our solution and simplifying platform management in:

• Themes: We have implemented some changes that will provide administrators with better visibility of theme usage on their site and a more user-friendly and efficient way to manage their site’s themes. 
• Integration & Support: Our work integrating community contributions continues at pace. We are also working on evolving our support framework. If your Moodle implementation relies on Oracle, make sure to watch this video; we are proposing changes to our support for these databases that you will want to know about. 
• Coding Practices: We are getting ready to upgrade to Bootstrap 5, modernising our front-end development capabilities. This is a big change and we have big plans in place to support it.

Until next sprint,
The Moodle Product Team

Dear Moodlers,

We're back with our monthly update about integrations.

1. We reached 400 million users on registered sites this month!

First up, we have surpassed 400 million users on registered sites, which is great news, as 1 out of 20 people on the planet are learning with Moodle, and that if we count only registered sites!!! You can see all our public statistics as well.

2. Integrations Survey 2024

This year's Integrations Survey is ready and we'd love it if you can spare 5 minutes to let us know which integrations are important to you. This way, we can focus our precious time working on the most relevant stuff. This year there is less writing and more clicking, so I think we'll beat the average 8 minutes time spent on it for the 2022 edition! Please complete the Integrations Survey 2024 here.

3. Two new exciting integrations!

Kialo, the platform for public debates, has recently launched a Moodle plugin. Kialo enables you to visualize discussions as an interactive tree of pro and con arguments. At the top is the thesis, which is supported or weakened by pro and con arguments underneath. Each one of these arguments can branch into subsequent arguments that support or attack them in turn. Discussion can be public (to all Kialo users) or private for a group of learners.

MaestrAI is the latest generative AI tool that is able to digest any content and spit out a full course with the informative and assessment items that you select. And best of all, the output can be exported as an H5P file or as a Moodle (MBZ) file for direct import to your LMS. It is still in beta, but you can request access at their website.