Here at the University of Glasgow we believe that it’s important that Moodle is kept up to date. First, because we want to take advantage of any new and improved features of Moodle and second because Moodle HQ do not support older versions of Moodle, leaving them potentially problematic from a security point of view.
So each summer (usually in July) our Moodle is upgraded to the most recent stable version of Moodle, with a smaller upgrade happening in December to include any fixes made to Moodle since the summer upgrade. A date is agreed for this after discussing the upgrade with IT Services and liaising with the TELT contacts via the TELT email list to find a date that will cause the minimum disruption.
This year the version of Moodle that we intend upgrading to (subject to thorough testing) is Moodle 3.1. This is not a big upgrade, it is just the next version after 2.9 and 3.0. The move from Moodle 1.9 to Moodle 2.0 was a move to a totally different system and required a lot of work from staff to recreate courses on the new Moodle 2 site; the move to Moodle 3.0 or 3.1 is not like that. It’s like the regular upgrades that happen each summer and December – Moodle might be offline one agreed morning for a couple of hours, but when the upgrade is over users can log in again and find their courses in the same place that they were before with all of the existing features still there.
For most people that will be it – they might not even notice any changes. But this time there are some new features that we think are going to be very popular. In particular, two strike us as being worthy of highlighting:
Course Recycle Bin
We think that this is a big deal. At the moment we can’t help users who accidentally delete resources or whole courses. Moodle 3.1 has a recycle bin that will keep deleted courses and activities for a week and allow staff members to restore them if they need to. We think that this feature in itself is important enough to warrant a move to Moodle 3.1.
Improved Marking Interface for Moodle Assignment
This is a significant step. Previously it was only possible to mark student submissions with Moodle’s PDF annotator if a student had submitted their assignment as a PDF. With Moodle 3.1, documents will be converted in the background to PDF and can be graded online by using Moodle’s PDF annotator. There are also changes to the grading interface to integrate the PDF annotator better with the grading area and make it easier for staff to use.
Other Enhancements
As well as the two big enhancements, there are some others which might be of interest:
- Improvements to Forums, such as the ability to pin posts
- Feedback has been overhauled and is now back as a fully supported activity.
Full release notes for Moodle 3.1 can be found here (although note that some features mentioned here might not appear on our site).
What happens next/how can you get involved?
We have the latest version of Moodle 3.1 installed on the LTU test Moodle site here (log in with your usual GUID). As a member of the TELT community, you are invited to explore the new features to see what you think of them and also to check that existing courses are behaving as they should. Please note that this version of Moodle 3.1 is still in beta, so features might be subject to change in the final version. Please also note that as we are still testing, debugging is switched on and this might result in you seeing some odd error messages. If you do see any, we’d appreciate it if you could copy and paste them into a Helpdesk request and submit it along with a detailed explanation of what you were doing in order that we can replicate the issue. Other feedback via the IT Helpdesk is also much appreciated as usual.
flickr photo by alfarman shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC) license