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Adaptable theme stable version released for Moodle 4 version

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July 28, 2022

Adaptable theme stable version released for Moodle 4 version

Adaptable Moodle theme has been updated to a stable version compatible with Moodle 4. Adaptable theme maintainer – Gareth J Barnard posted about the new version release of the theme on Moodle forums. You can download the latest version of the theme from Moodle Plugins directory here.

Adaptable is one of the most popular free Moodle theme over last few years since its release. It has been very well maintained by Gareth & team and supported all Moodle versions. The maintainers of theme also include Jez H, Manoj Solanki & Fernando Acedo.

Adaptable is the second most downloaded theme on Moodle Plugins directory in last one year with 40k downloads. The theme also comes with other useful Moodle plugins like Course Slider, Adaptable News Slider & Bootstrap Elements. You can check out all complementary plugins here.

Although it is a stable version of Adaptable theme, but it is recommended to test it out on a development server instead of your live Moodle site. If you notice any bugs, you can head to Moodle themes forum and post your issue there.

Which Moodle theme are you using on your Moodle site? Have you also used the Adaptable Moodle theme? Do let us know in the comments section below.

Sakai LMS 22.1 version released with 200+ improvements

Jaswinder Singh

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July 27, 2022

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Sakai LMS 22.1 version released with 200+ improvements

Sakai LMS – the open source Learning Management, Communications & Collaborations Platform has released the 22.1 version. The new version of Sakai LMS brought a brand new communication tool – Conversations. In addition the new version also includes enhancements to Assignments, Basic LTI, Forums/Discussions, Gradebook, Lessons, Rubrics, Tests & Quizzes, and more.

Sakai LMS is a Java-based, service-oriented web application which allows you to create teaching and learning, portfolios, research, and ad-hoc projects. It is a part of the Apereo Foundation which also supports other projects like OpenCast, OpenEQUELLA & ELMS Learning Network.

Here are the other main improvements in Sakai 22 version:

Calendar Design Upgrade
Conversations – New tool!
Lessons improvements
LTI Advantage Improvements

You can download the latest version of Sakai LMS from the official website through this link. Complete list of fixes, features and contributions can be checked here.

It produces the best learning outcomes and has led the LMS field in faculty and student satisfaction for several years running. It was developed as open source software as a community effort since its first release in 2005. Sakai includes LMS features like document distribution, a gradebook, discussion, live chat, assignment uploads, and online testing. It also offers collaborative tools for research and group projects.

For more information please visit the official website here – https://www.sakailms.org

Which LMS you are using – Moodle, Canvas or Sakai and why? Please share your views in the comments section below.

1EdTech Annual Member Meeting and Roadmap 2022 on August 10

EdTech Market

Jaswinder Singh

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July 27, 2022

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1EdTech Annual Member Meeting and Roadmap 2022 on August 10

The 1EdTech annual member meeting 2022 will be organized on August 10 2022. The conference will be the platform to review annual progress review and look ahead to the emerging edtech ecosystem trends and workstream priorities for 2023.

This year the conference will be organized virtually and anyone can register for the same. The registration is free of cost for all interesting members. All sessions will be delivered virtually, recorded, and available for playback post-event to everyone who registers in advance.

The conference program includes notable speakers like David Stovenour, Thomas Cavanagh, Kevin Lewis, Gwendolyn Britton and many more. You can check out the complete list of speakers for this year’s 1EdTech Annual Member Meeting and Roadmap 2022.

The last date for registration is August 09 2022. You can register your free seat through this link. The conference schedule includes many interesting and exciting sessions like

Building European Edtech Ecosystems Using 1EdTech and Non-1EdTech Standards
How to Build Learning Ecosystems That Make an Impact?
Digital Credentials Adoption through Certification
Benefits of Participating in Project Working Groups
K-12 Session: Engagement and Outcomes Data

Check out the complete schedule for the 1EdTech Annual Member Meeting and Roadmap 2022 conference here.

For all those unversed, IMS Global Learning Consortium has officially rebranded as the 1EdTech Consortium. It is the world’s leading member-based non-profit community partnership of educational providers, state/national departments of education, and edtech suppliers.

Get ready for InstructureCon Asia Pacific 2022 on August 18 2022

Jaswinder Singh

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July 26, 2022

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Get ready for InstructureCon Asia Pacific 2022 on August 18 2022

InstructureCon Asia Pacific – the edtech conference from Canvas LMS team is all set for August 18 2022 for Asia Pacific region. Like last year’s this year also the event will be free for all interested attendees.

The edtech conference will be a good option to connect with other Canvas users, learn new things happening in Canvas world. The speakers list includes:

Simone Giertz
Adam Grant
Dr. Jordan Nguyen

You can check out the full agenda for the InstructureCon Asia Pacific 2022 on the official website here. The conference will kickstart on August 18 2022 10:30 AM AEST and will close by 04:30 PM AEST time with a closing keynote by Adam Grant.

This will be the second InstructureCon 2022 of the year after the first one in North America on July 14. After Asia Pacific (this), there will be two more events as follows:

Latin America – 14 September 2022
Europe, Middle East + Africa – 28 September 2022

In the first event in North America, over 10,000 users have registered to attend the event, sharing useful solutions and edtech insights and learning from each other.

Moodle Tips – How to display static information pages in Moodle

Jaswinder Singh

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July 22, 2022

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Moodle Tips – How to display static information pages in Moodle

Moodle is the world’s most popular open source LMS. It has all the tools and resources to lift your online learning environment which is spread across courses. All users need to have an account in Moodle before accessing the courses which can be helpful to track their activities and their learning progress.

There are requirements from Moodle administrators to display static information like an help page, a faq or a contact page. This can be achieved by Adding all these pages into a course and then opening the access for guest users. However, there is a Moodle plugin – “Static Pages” which can display all such types of content easily.

The Static Pages plugin is very popular among Moodle users since it is released. It is designed to deliver static HTML documents, enriched with Moodle layout and navigation as a standard Moodle page which exist outside any course.

Static pages created through this plugin will be available on catchy URLs like http://www.yourmoodle.com/static/faq.html and can be linked from Moodle HTML blocks, from your Moodle theme. This will turn your Moodle LMS Into a full fledged CMS.

Static Pages Moodle Plugin

How to install:

To get started with the Static Pages plugin, you need to download it from the Moodle Plugins directory. Since, it is a Local type Moodle plugin, you need to install it into your_moodle_site/local/ directory followed by completing the installation process through the Notifications page.

If you are not familiar with Moodle plugins installation, check out the complete Moodle Plugins Installation guide here.

How to setup:

In the Documents area, you can upload already created html files which makes it easy to show in Moodle. For each static page you want to serve, upload a HTML document, named as [pagename].html. local_staticpage then uses this filename as pagename.

In the settings area you can configure various settings like data source for the static page title.

You can also add css elements to style your static pages directly. For more information, you can refer to this documentation guide.

Once you are done, you can add the html files which needs to be displayed in the static pages.

Moodle HQ to focus on improving the User Experience in Moodle 4.2

Jaswinder Singh

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July 22, 2022

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Moodle HQ to focus on improving the User Experience in Moodle 4.2

Moodle HQ is working hard to improve upon the User Experience in last few months. The world’s most popular open source Learning Management system has seen many new changes in the last releases which are focused towards user experience improvement. After the upcoming Moodle 4.1which will be released in November 2022, Moodle HQ team has eyed further User Experience improvements for Moodle 4.2 release.

In the recently concluded MoodleMoot France 2022, Marie Achour – Head of Product Management at Moodle HQ shared the roadmap for the new Moodle version releases. Moodle 4.1 will focused on improving the user experience towards:

Database,
Group Assignment File Handling
Gradebook
Follow up from Moodle 4.0

While Moodle 4.2 will be focused towards improving the UX for other course activities like:

Quiz
Assignments
Database
Bulk Activity Editing
Gradebook

Moodle 4.2 is scheduled to be released in May 2023 as per the release calendar. Which are the areas which need to be improved in terms of UX in Moodle. You can post your opinion in the comments section below.

Start Teaching with Moodle in just 15 minutes – Free Book

Jaswinder Singh

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July 21, 2022

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Start Teaching with Moodle in just 15 minutes – Free Book

Moodle users often look for resources to get started teaching with Moodle. Many Moodle users often make a google search to look towards “getting started with Moodle in 15 minutes”. Here you can download one of the best free Moodle books which can help you in getting started teaching with Moodle.

You can setup your first Moodle course with activities and resource & enroll real users in less than 15 minutes. This book will be regularly updated to add new instructions based on the latest Moodle version release, so make sure that you have downloaded the latest version of this book.

Please enter your Name & Email ID to start your download:

[email-download-link namefield=”YES” id=”2″]

Moodle Attendance plugin updated with useful improvements – Check out now

Jaswinder Singh

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July 21, 2022

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Moodle Attendance plugin updated with useful improvements – Check out now

Attendance is an activity Moodle plugin which allows the teacher to take attendance during class, and for students to be able to view their own attendance record. It is very popular Moodle plugin among the users. It is intended to be used in blended learning environment or supplementing a paper-based attendance register.

Dublin City University helped the attendance plugin improved with new features with an aim to make it easier for staff to record student attendance. The new features added in the plugin allows:

Allow editing teachers on a Moodle course to import a CSV file of sessions to a particular Attendance activity on their course
Support repeating sessions when importing CSV file of sessions
Support passwords when importing CSV file of sessions
Support importing sessions to multiple courses at once using a CSV file, without the need for one minute difference in the start and end time
Allow for the selection of 59 individual minutes and not intervals of 5 minutes

The new improvements helped in a more streamlined experience for teachers. The time and effort involved in configuring large classes in Moodle Attendance has been reduced significantly.

You can download the latest version of the Attendance plugin to use these new features.

Moodle Tips – Make Moodle easier for new teachers using Site Admin Presets feature

Jaswinder Singh

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July 20, 2022

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Moodle Tips – Make Moodle easier for new teachers using Site Admin Presets feature

Moodle 4.0 brought a whole plethora of new features which make it most exciting Moodle version ever. One such feature in Moodle 4.0 is Site Admin Presets feature. The new feature is included into the Moodle core inspiring from the Site Admin presets plugin.

The Site Admin Presets feature allows you to improve the user experience for educators and learners on your Moodle site. Moodle contains a whole lot of tools and features which can be sometimes difficult to understand from the teachers & learners who are using Moodle for the first time. This feature helps Moodle administrators streamline the experience for teachers and learners by offering them customised LMS settings to support their needs.

Site Admin Presets helps you to keep things simple and remove anything their users don’t need. You can enable only the required features on your Moodle and turn off the ones which are not required. Moodle 4.0 comes with 2 default presets which allows you to use Starter & Full preset.

The starter preset, has Moodle’s most popular features, including assignment, feedback, forum, H5P, quiz and completion tracking. On the other hand, full preset includes features that only more advanced users might be utilising, such as external tool (LTI), SCORM, workshop, analytics, badges, competencies or learning plans.

In addition you can also create new presets specifically picking the features based on your learning environment requirements. You can also import & export the presets to use on other Moodle platforms. This makes it easy to replicate a specific configuration from one site to another and ensures that the experience that administrators provide to teachers and learners is consistent.

How to use the Site Admin Presets in Moodle 4.0

Go to your Moodle 4.0 site as an admin and navigate to Admin presets under Site Administration > General > Admin Presets
Change the default preset to ‘Starter’ and go back to see the changes on your course page. For example, you will see less activities while adding a new activity in the course as shown below:
Moodle Site Admin Presets

This new feature can be utilized by the Moodle site administrators to make the interface clear and concise for the teachers & students.

What are the other new features in Moodle which made you excited? Please share with us in the comments section below.

Moodle Release calendar – How you should plan to upgrade your Moodle site

Jaswinder Singh

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July 19, 2022

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Moodle Release calendar – How you should plan to upgrade your Moodle site

Moodle is the world’s most popular open Source Learning Management system. It is used globally with more than 325 million users across 240+ countries. Since the release of Moodle 2, there is a new Moodle version released every few months. Moodle Administrators often struggle to devise a strategy to keep their Moodle site updated to latest version. In this post, we will see the schedule for release of Moodle version so that you can plan your upgrade process accordingly.

Moodle is following a half-yearly cycle for the new version release. The six-monthly release is termed as Major release. Major versions are intended to introduce new features & functionality in Moodle core. Then, there is a version release after every two months, which is termed as Minor release. This version is mainly intended to fix the bugs & security issues in the Moodle core. There is another Major version which is termed as LTS release which is generally released after every 2 years or 4 major releases.

Moodle HQ team will provide support for general core bugs for 12 months (1 year) from the date of release for all Major versions. After general support period, the support is limited only for the security issues which will be provided for 18 months from date of release.

The support period for the LTS version is maximum which is 18 months for General bugs and 30 months for security fixes. The LTS Version is planned to cater the need for the educational institutes which need a longer period to plan their upgrade. The most recent long-term support release (LTS) version is Moodle 3.9 while the next release (Moodle 4.1) will be November 2022.

You can refer to above image for the upcoming Moodle version releases and the support period. You can check the official Moodle release page here to check the currently supported Moodle versions and the support period.

Once you have finalize the schedule & frequency for your Moodle site, you can follow the Upgrade process as mentioned here.