MoodleMoot DACH, which is the Moodle community event in Germany, is unfortunately cancelled for this year. The MoodleMoot DACH 2022 was planned for August 30 – September 2 (a 4 day event). The reasons for cancellations are not known.
The community event is hosted by Technische Hochschule Lübeck, Vienna University of Technology, University of Vienna, Academic Moodle Cooperation (AMC), ETH Zurich & eDaktik.at – Moodle Partner Austria.
The event was last hosted in the year 2020. It is generally comprising with a DevCamp on first 2 days and BarCamp in the later days.
As per the information available on the official website, the next MoodleMoot DACH 2023 will be hosted in Zurich.
For more information about the MoodleMoot DACH, you can check out the official website here. You can also follow them on Twitter or Facebook.
BigBlueButton is world’s most popular open source web conferencing platform. In Moodle 4.0, the BigBlueButton is integrated in Moodle core. Moodle Academy has released a new course on delivering effective virtual classrooms using BigBlueButton in Moodle.
The course will have a free webinar on Using BigBlueButton with Moodle effectively. If you are a Moodle user who is looking to learn how to use BigBlueButton for online teaching, then this webinar is for you. After joining the webinar and attending the course, you will be able to setup a BigBlueButton activity and customize it.
You will be able to learn the basic theories of learning and how they apply to a virtual classroom, how to structure segments in a virtual classroom to maximise active learning for your students. In addition, you will be able to how to deliver an effective virtual class across four key foundations: management, relationship, engagement, and assessment and how BigBlueButton supports delivery in each of the above foundations.
The free webinar will be organized on Wednesday, 27 July 2022 13:00-14:00 (UTC) time. You can register for the free webinar through the Moodle Academy link here.
Course Relative Dates is an experimental feature which was introduced in Moodle 3.8. The course relative dates features enables course or activity dates to be displayed relative to the user’s start date in the course. This feature can be very helpful in asynchronous courses where you have users enrolling in the course throughout the year.
Let’s say that User 1 is enrolled in your course on 4th July, so he will see the 1st week content after his enrollment. Similarly User 2 is enrolled in your course on 11 July, so he will see the 1st week course content after his enrollment but the User 1 will be able to see the 2nd Week content by now.
The users course start date is their enrolment start date. The experimental feature is available only for the following areas since Moodle 3.8:
Weekly Course Format
Assignments
However, the feature is planned to be added to other course areas like Quiz, Lesson or other Restrict Activity areas.
Kindly note that in order to use the course relative dates feature, you need to enable this on before the start of the course. Relative dates mode cannot be changed once the course has been created. Relative dates mode cannot be enabled for existing courses.
How to use the Course Relative Dates feature
Before you can use this feature, the site administrator need to enable this feature. To enable this feature, please check the Site administration > Development > Experimental settings > Course Relative Dates.
Now as a teacher, when you add a new course, you will see a new setting under the General Section of Course Settings page.
Course Relative Dates feature in Moodle
However, it seems that the Moodle HQ need some more time to make it as a stable feature in Moodle core. With all the focus towards improving the UX of Moodle, it may be coming in future Moodle version in core. In case you are interested in using this feature, you can vote for the Tracker MDL-66044 to get it developed for all activities.
With the first of its kind hackathon initiative, United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology (OICT) announced the winners. The hackathon – ‘Get plugged into education!’ was aimed to expand the footprint of digital learning possibilities.
There were three challenges for anyone to participate in the Moodle Hackathon. Initially there were only two challenges while the third one was added later. The three challenges were:
The Mobile App Challenge to improve or extend Moodle plugins for the Moodle mobile app
The VideoConf Challenge to improve or extend Moodle plugins
An open challenge for anyone working on a plugin to improve Moodle functionalities
Winners of Hackathon
Here are the winners of the Hackathon:
1st Prize:
Mr. Essoh Lathe Gnagne Sebastien, Principal Inspector, Ministry of National Education and Technical Education, Government of Côte d’Ivoir. Mr. Sebastien solution helped Jitsi plugin to integrate the Moodle course groups. The Jitsi plugin allows teachers to create webconference activities fully integrated with Jitsi Meet—an open-source videoconferencing solution.
2nd Prize:
Mr. Étienne Roy (RÉCIT FAD team). The RÉCIT FAD team developed the HTML Bootstrap Editor plugin which allows to create a much more attractive and ergonomic HTML content directly in Moodle.
3rd Prize:
Ms. Marie-Eve Lévesque, Mr. Annouar Faraman and Mr. Andrew Caya (University of Montreal, Canada) The team developed a combined calendar which provide users with an overview of group events in the form of a table, where events are grouped by time (for events having exactly the same start and end times).
Honorable mentions
Mr. Renaat Debleu (IT Specialist, eWallah) who developed a Moodle plugin which can translate a Moodle course using Neural Machine Engines.
The second BigBlueButton World 2022 conference will be organized from July 18th-21st 2022. The theme for this year’s conference will be “Hope through Education”. This year the conference will be held completely online.
The aim of this conference is to showcase the importance of education and educators, explore how education is shifting in the online environment, share examples of how education is raising communities (and countries), and host discussions about the future of virtual classrooms.
The 4-day conference is full of exciting sessions with different topics for each day. The agenda will be distributed as:
Day-1 Hope through Education – The day will include a speaker from UNSECO and educators from around the world. Representatives from leading educational research institutions will also be sharing their thoughts on the future of online learning.
Day-2 Development
Day-3 Administration
Day-4 Ecosystem
You can check out the whole agenda for the BigBlueButton World 2022 on the official website here. The conference will provide 4 days of inspiring discussions on the future of the BigBlueButton Project and how it’s improving the world of online learning.
You can register for the BIgBlueButton World 2022 through this link.
Moodle has released the minor versions of Moodle 4.0 and other supported versions. The new version release includes minor bug fixes and other improvements in core. In addition to Moodle 4.0.2, other Moodle versions like Moodle 3.11.8, 3.9.15 are released.
The new version of Moodle brings many general fixes and improvements, accessibility improvements and some security fixes. Here is the list of all fixed issues in Moodle 4.0.2.
Notably, the support for Moodle 3.10, 3.8 & other lower versions have ended. So, in case you still have an older Moodle version running on your site, you are advised to upgrade it to the latest version on priority. Please these official docs to upgrade your Moodle site.
You can download the latest Moodle version from the official Moodle download channels like Moodle Download page or through Git.
Many times as a teacher you need to add new content or update the existing course content which leaves students guessing all the time. In previous Moodle versions, there was no way to notify students about the changes you made in course content. In this Moodle Tips for Beginners series, we will look at the Notify Course Content feature in Moodle 4.0.
Moodle 4.0 brought a lot of new features on the table with major focus on User experience and Quiz. However, one handy feature which is quite helpful for teachers is the “Notify students on new or updated course content”.
With the new features now you can see a small little checkbox on the bottom of Activity/Resource settings page, just above the Save button. If you check this box then the users who have access to that activity will receive the notification.
The only thing which you need to ensure is that in the User profile -> Notification preferences section. The “Course content changes” notification type is enabled for both online and offline in the “Email” column. In addition the Cron job must be set properly to send the notifications.
What are the other features which you liked the most in Moodle 4.0? Have you ever need to send the course content update notification to your students in past? Do share your experience with us in the comments section below.
Moodle 4.1 will be the next major version of Moodle releasing in November 2022. Like the recently released Moodle 4.0 the next major version will also continue to improvise on the User Experience with other significant improvements.
Moodle 4.1 will continue to focus towards improving the overall User Experience. Additionally it will be an LTS (Long Term Support) version release. The Moodle HQ team is working on various features to make Moodle – a better LMS for the next decade.
Moodle 4.1 Exciting new features
Here are some exciting new features which will be coming in Moodle 4.1 version:
User Experience Improvements – After a major overhaul of User Experience in Moodle 4.0, the next version will focus on improvising course activities like Quiz, Assignment, gradebook & other areas like filters.
Moodle App Store – The plugins developers will can build financial sustainability for their work, while teachers will have easier access to use hundreds of new plugins in their courses via the web interface, without needing to convince their admins to install code. This will help the entire plugins ecosystem.
Question Bank Improvements – In Moodle 4.1, the question bank will be enhanced significantly with a new question bank activity. There will not be a question bank by default for all courses, you can choose if you want one. Manage categories screen in the question bank will also be improved. There are hell lot of changes in the Quiz activity and Question bank coming in Moodle 4.1, please check out this forum thread for all changes..
Database Activity Improvements – The MUA supported project which aims to modernise Moodle’s database interface, improve the existing workflows and make its usage a more intuitive and user-friendly experience. The goals of this project are:
To makes it easy for teachers to create new database activities, providing a new set of presets and preview mode
To improve the student experience by providing a better experience with the existing views in his journey.
Better integrations between Moodle products
Better integration with Open EdTech products and major stakeholders to design and build an open architecture for a long-term future
Moodle as the name suggests is Modular in nature with provision for feature extension through Moodle Plugins. With the use of plugins you can extend any feature in Moodle as it support a wide variety of plugins. Recently, Moodle community has achieved a major landmark milestone with reaching 2,000 community contributed plugins in official Plugins directory.
There are now 2,000 official plugins in the Plugins directory which are contributed by 1105 developers. The plugins have been downloaded 427k times overall.
Here are the top 10 most downloaded plugins in last 12 months:
Over the last 20 years since the release of first version of Moodle, many developers have spent enormous amount of efforts & time to make it world’s most popular LMS. There have been many popular plugins contributed from Moodle community which have made their way into Moodle core. A recent example is the Admin Presets Plugin which has been added into Moodle 4.0 version.
A big salute from the LMS Daily team to each and every individual developer who has contributed in achieving such a huge landmark of 2,000 plugins.
Which plugins are you using on your Moodle site? What makes them your favorite? Do share with us in the comments section below.
Early bird registration deadline for the third MoodleMoot Global 2022 is July 31. The third MoodleMoot Global will be an in-person event in Barcelona, Spain. The theme for this yea’s event is the future of education with more than 600 Moodlers expected to join from around the world.
The MoodleMoot Global will be organized from September 27-29 and a lot of the Moodle HQ team will be participating. The venue for this year’s event is Hotel Barceló Sants. The event was organized virtually over the last two years due to COVID Pandemic.
MoodleMoot Global provides a range of professional learning and networking opportunities through workshops, presentations, panels and fun social events, in an inclusive and open environment.
The streams for MoodleMoot Global 2022 are following:
Educator: Learner-centred education (for schools, workplaces, universities and more)
Administrator: Moodle site management
Developer: Moodle code development
Early bird registration deadline – 31 July 2022
Here are the ticket pricing details for the Global MoodleMoot 2022:
