Moodle.org: "Moodle 1.9.1 was recently released and is recommended as an upgrade for all Moodle users. There were no security bugs but over 400 issues were dealt with and there are a few minor new features, such as support for captcha during email registration."

Complete Story

I missed the announcement early last week, but Moodle 1.9 was made available in early March. Since I haven't mentioned anything about Moodle since last October, I have some making up to do with the open source project responsible for this course and learning management system.

Significant new features in this new version of Moodle include:

• An all-new Gradebook designed from the ground up for expansion and integration with other systems
• Integrated support for Outcomes, so that learning goals can be tied to individual courses and activities, and can be graded against.
• Performance improvements due to review and refactoring of many parts of the Moodle code.
• Tagging is now a core function allowing users to easily link things like users, blogs, courses etc as well as external sites like Flickr and Youtube through the use of simple tags.

• Accessibility improvements (Complies with all major international standards in this area, including XHTML Strict 1.0).
• Moodle Network (Allows for cross-site roaming)
• Roles improvements

Moodle Job at Moodle HQ - by Martin Dougiamas.  

We're looking for an experienced developer to work with us as part of the core development team on-site at Moodle HQ in Perth.

Strong PHP skills and good web design are definitely required to succeed in this role. You will need a high degree of self-motivation but will have the support of a knowledgeable team in Perth as well as a fun international developer community. A solid understanding of Moodle architecture will be viewed favourably.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Moodle 1.7 has been released. Moodle is a course management system (also called a learning management system) and used by educators to build online learning communities.

The five most significant features added to Moodle according to the release notes are:

• Roles - Moodle has a complete new architecture for assigning people permissions. Permissions based on fine-grained capabilities allow all kinds of roles to be created and assigned in all contexts around Moodle. This creates a great deal more flexibility in the permissions that you can grant to people.
• XML database schema - In addition to MySQL and PostGreSQL, Moodle also supports Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.
• New administrative interface - A new admin interface with accessible design and cool features to make access to settings fast and easy.

"I must have blinked when this was announced, but OpenAcademic.org sounds like a perfect scenario. Development efforts to integrate some of the biggest open source tools used in online education. It sounds like the goal is to come up with a way for Drupal, Elgg, Mediawiki, and Moodle to all play nicely together, in such a way as to be easily deployable and maintainable by even the smallest school. Rather than attempting to build The One True LMS, they're taking the approach of playing to the strengths of the available tools, and putting the effort into integration."

Complete Story

This release includes over a year (!) of new features developed by the community of Moodle developers, as well as countless bug fixes and a lot of restructuring under the hood.

For full information see the Moodle 1.6 release notes - some of the major highlights include:

• 100% Unicode support - all 70 existing languages are now compatible and can be mixed wherever you like.
  
• New documentation wiki - a one-stop shop for all documentation, integrated from within each page of Moodle itself.
• Database module - a new activity module for collaborative collection and display of arbitrary data
• Blogs - finally Moodle has blogs for ongoing personal reflections, viewable by course, by group, by individual etc
• New reports - plug-in reports enable you to create and share new report types. New statistics reports are included in Moodle 1.6.
• Questions - quiz question types are now a centralised structure so any module will be able to use them in future.
• LAMS - a new activity module and course format allow LAMS to be easily integrated with Moodle if you need to
• Multiple groups - users can be part of any number of groups in a course
• New Chameleon theme - can be customised in your browser on the fly!
• Granularised backup - allows you to backup only selected activities
• Multi Enrolments - use any number of Moodle's enrolment methods at once, including the new IMS Enterprise methods"

Read more...Moodle 1.6 goes gold!