Moodle gets a makeover
Moodle has launched the latest version of its open source learning platform, with improvements to navigation, the addition of activities such as Lesson and Quiz, and new administration settings.
Moodle 2.9 is based on the work of the core team and contributions from the community, and is designed to be easy to use by students, educators and administrators.
"Our core goal is to support and improve education by making our teachers and trainers more effective, and Moodle continues its evolution in Moodle 2.9 with enhancements for users at all levels" says Martin Dougiamas, Moodle founder and CEO.
"Working from the navigation overhaul specification with the input of the HQ team and community over the past 12 months, the core interface has seen some solid progress in making Moodle simple and friendlier for educators and students," says Dougiamas.
Along with navigation and user interface advancements, the upgrade includes the introduction of conditional quiz questions, lesson improvements including the new completion condition for required time spent, a new activity results block, course editing improvements, the ability to post to all forums at once, and course enrolment improvements.
For developers of plugins and customisations, Moodle 2.9 now supports the use of Javascript Modules and jQuery and this is recommended for all new javascript.
This change is a response to the discontinued development of the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library announced in 2014 by Yahoo Engineering.
jQuery offers Moodle developers a large library to handle cross browser issues.
Another new feature of interest to developers is the inclusion of the Mustache templating framework.
With more than 250,000 downloads of Moodle's previous release, it is anticipated that Moodle 2.9 will surpass these numbers.
This release is supported for 18 months and the last of the major releases for Moodle 2, with Moodle 3.0 anticipated for later this year.
Availability
Moodle 2.9 is available to download free from http://download.moodle.org/ or via Git. Alternatively, users can seek the support of certified Moodle Partners for services including hosting, installation, customisation and more.
