Moodle 3.8 has landed! The core development team have been busy at HQ for the past 6 months, working toward this release. Naturally, being an open source project, it would be remiss not to recognise the contributions of the Moodle Community, including HQ, partners, non-core developers, customers and users.
As we’ve come to expect, there’s a number of new features, enhancements to existing features, bug fixes and security patches. Moodle 3.8 brings the H5P integration, significant enhancements to forums and improved Learning Analytics.
Headline features for Moodle 3.8 include:
H5P
In collaboration with Joubel, the creators of H5P, Moodle 3.8 sees the first phase of the H5P integration. H5P activities can now be uploaded from the Atto editor and there’s a new filter that will automatically recognise H5P URLs from trusted sites. H5P content can be displayed from within Moodle without requiring any additional plugins.
Forum improvements
Introducing a range of new features that make Moodle Forums substantially more powerful. Teachers are now able to grade their students’ forum contributions with the introduction of the forum grader functionality. Student activity can be reviewed with the new forum summary report and forum content can be exported for further analysis. There’s also a new user preference where a new design can be selected for the nested discussion view.
Improvements to learning analytics
Moodle 3.8 introduces new models to help identify students who haven’t logged into the course yet, or students who haven’t logged in for some time. Helping teachers identify students who could benefit from being reached out to. It is now also possible to apply bulk actions to insights. A new insight results report provides a summary of the insights that were generated and how they were used and it is now also possible to run the machine learning algorithms from a separate server to reduce load on the main Moodle server.
New emojis!
Enjoy improved communication through Moodle by benefiting from a full range of emojis, exactly like those on your mobile phone. These can be browsed and used within Moodle Messaging as well as from the Atto text editor.
Course overview
System administrators now have the ability to configure which layout options are available to the user (card, list, summary). It is now also possible to create course filter options using a custom course field.
Question bank
Question IDs and tags are now shown next to the question name, making it easier to manage and organise quiz questions.
Back-up
It is now possible to exclude files from the back up making it much quicker when doing a backup followed immediately by a restore. The order in which courses are backed up is also improved ensuring that those new and most recently modified courses are prioritised.
Assignment grading
Uploaded images are now automatically rotated saving time while grading.
For more information, please refer to Moodle 3.8 What’s New guide, Moodle 3.8 Features page and Moodle 3.8 Release Notes. As per usual, Moodle can be downloaded from the official Moodle Download page.
If you’d like to discuss your requirement or need further assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to Moodle Partner, My Learning Space.