Hello Moodlers,
Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’!
It’s been a very busy time at Moodle Products over the last few weeks, with many of our team members attending MoodleMoot Global in Merida, Mexico. We had a blast spending time with over 350 members of our community, celebrating all things Moodle with them. The event’s agenda was full of fantastic talks, which can be viewed on the Moodle YouTube channel, our ever popular Jam events, and the famous Moodle Party.
On November 5th, we were very proud to announce the release of Moodle Workplace 4.5. From advanced course discovery and curated offerings in the Learning Catalogue, to AI-driven tools designed to elevate content creation, the new release focuses on making learning more engaging, accessible, and tailored. We invite you to find out all about its benefits by checking out our release announcement.
Upon returning from Mexico, the team dived right into planning mode to finalise our plans for the next Moodle LMS and Moodle Workplace releases.
Some of the highlights you can expect to see come to life include:
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A range of new AI-driven functionality, including integration options with more AI providers (AWS Bedrock and Ollama are next on our list) and new capabilities to help students get more out of their learning experiences in Moodle, such as actions to support translations and other personalisation of learning content options (check out the roadmap for all the details)!
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Much-needed improvements to the Assignment Grader experience, making grading easier for teachers (check out the prototypes here & here to see where we are heading)
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Optimisations to our Administration Settings, including smarter search functionality and more user-friendly descriptions of key settings (MFA settings will be first off the rank).
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The retiring of functionality that make Moodle harder to use and run than it should be, including the removal of the Chat & Survey tools, the Atto text editor and support for Oracle Databases (don’t worry, Chat, Survey and Atto will remain available as plugins for the few of you who still need them).
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More goodness for LTI lovers, with the migration of mod_lti into core. This will enable the use of LTI placements in the text editor, course navigation and assignments (find out more here).
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The launch of support for SMS notifications, critical for everyone in the world who doesn’t always have access to the internet but still wants to stay connected to their learning (which is still more than 34% of the world’s population - about 2.6 billion people!).
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For our Workplace customers, you can expect to see data visualisations come to report builder (charts are coming!), improvements to multi-tenant settings, programs available in the course catalogue and, the much much requested ‘user in multiple tenants’ functionality.
We will also complete our next MUA project, the upgrade to Bootstrap 5.0, and all our products (including our beloved Mobile Applications) will go through their annual accessibility audits and be certified to WCAG 2.2 (vs 2.1) for the first time.
With all the travel and the planning work, we don’t have a lot to share in terms of demo videos this time around, but we did think you’d like to see what a team gets up to during a release sprint, so here is the Showcase Short from the Moodle Workplace team in full. You’ll notice they don’t stop for a release, and the improvements keep coming!
Go to the forum to see the video!
That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’; we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.
Until Next Sprint!
The Moodle Product Team
