The Savvy Technologist

Moodle gets significant upgrade

Moodle fans everywhere rejoiced yesterday with the release of version 1.6. The new version brings some significant improvements. Here are a few of the ones that matter most to me:

• “My Moodle” page now presents a summary of all the work going on in whatever courses a student is enrolled. We have a quite a few students who have more than one teacher using Moodle. This will help them keep up across the board.
• Multiple group membership means that teachers can create multiple groups and students can be members of more than one group. This is a huge improvement and will allow teachers to do much more flexible grouping on a per assignment basis while preserving course-wide groups.
• The database module is a totally flexible module for creating all kinds of custom activities that include multimedia, comments, votes, etc. Nothing like this existed before, and it’s really going to open Moodle up to some creative uses.
• Blogging comes to Moodle in version 1.6. Every Moodle user will now have their own blog that supports tagging and even podcasts. There was a lot of discussion about this and Martin himself explains the rationale for why blogs work the way they do in 1.6. Bottom line: this is just a start for blogging in Moodle and integration with the rest of the Moodle tools is really complicated.

There a bunch more, but those hit closer to home than most. If you’re just learning about Moodle you may be interested in the podcast interview I did with Moodle creator Martin Dougiamas last November.

Tags: moodle